The White House is touting an agreement with pharmaceutical companies that will reduce Medicare costs by $6 billion by 2026. Seniors will save $1.5 billion as a result. The headlines will score political points, but a less rosy prognosis is emerging: more suffering tomorrow for the relief promised today.

In a victory lap on Thursday, President Biden touted the reduction in the cost of 10 drugs. “We have finally beaten the pharmaceutical industry,” he said. A White House statement attributed this to the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which authorized Medicare to “negotiate prescription drug prices.” That law “was signed by President Biden, with Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.”

When the euphoria of the announcement wears off, expect Ms Harris to seek distance from these policies, as she has done with so many of Mr Biden’s initiatives. Price controls – the essence of the Medicare deal – may be popular in the short term, but they always have unintended consequences for the market.

The Inflation Reduction Act “throws overboard decades of bipartisan consensus on the U.S. drug market to launch an unproven pricing experiment,” two former Trump administration officials, Joe Grogan and John Czwartacki, now with the Health Market and Policy Network, said in an email to the Sun.

Grogan, who headed the Domestic Policy Council, and Czwartacki, a former Office of Management and Budget official, wrote that they “understand the temptation to see the drug deal as a victory. But the evidence is mounting that nothing comes for free.”

While Biden criticized Big Pharma’s “exorbitant” profits, he ignored how that money funds the search for new cures and treatments. A life sciences company, IQVIA, which tracks clinical research, found that companies have reduced their research and development spending by 22 percent since 2021. This affects all Americans, whether they are on Medicare or not.

In addition to price-negotiating power, the Inflation Reduction Act imposed an “inflation tax” on Medicare, which was estimated to save a total of $266 billion by 2031. However, the American Action Forum noted in October that Medicare was “part of the unified federal budget” and therefore recipients would not receive any corresponding benefits.

“The savings the IRA will deliver,” the forum wrote, “will be offset—in fact, exceeded—by the $670 billion in clean energy tax credits and other energy and environmental spending alone,” and “even leave a balance that can be borrowed” to keep Medicare solvent.

During his 2000 presidential campaign, Forbes editor Malcolm “Steve” Forbes compared the Treasury Department to a pot of honey and politicians to bears. “You know what happens when you put a big pot of money in Washington, DC,” he said. “The political animals can’t help themselves. They have to spend it. That’s their nature.”

The Inflation Reduction Act also attempted to fix Medicare by increasing insurers’ liability. As a result, prescription drug premiums “skyrocketed from $64.28 in 2024 to $179.45 in 2025,” the Paragon Health Institute wrote earlier this month.

Expect Medicare Part D premiums to follow suit. Far from financially strong, Part D is deep in the red, prompting the Biden administration to issue a bailout package last month—another Band-Aid for a chronic problem.

“The Biden administration,” Paragon said, “is using billions of taxpayer dollars to cynically bail out insurance companies and lower premiums for seniors just months before the election.” Before his 2012 campaign, President Obama used similar tricks with Medicare Advantage, a move that raised “legal concerns,” according to the Government Accountability Office.

Medicare suffered from cost overruns from the start. When it was introduced in 1966, it cost $3 billion. The Congressional Budget Office had projected that this amount, taking inflation into account, would be only $12 billion by 1990. Instead, it cost $107 billion, almost nine times as much.

Biden and Harris know Medicare is popular and drug companies are easy targets. But seniors aren’t interested in political games. They’ll soon be crushed by high costs after being promised honey at election time by bears who are far better suited to selling snake oil.