Our leaders have merged their radical climate agenda with the health care of millions of Americans.

From Just the News. The Biden administration took an unprecedented step of rolling its climate agenda into a health care concern with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). According to critics, it makes climate change a priority. In both cases, they say, it’s not accomplishing anything with either goal.

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Diverted funds

Medicare provisions within the IRA are siphoning funds into green energy policies, Isabelle Morales, federal affairs manager for Americans For Tax Reform, told Just The News. The IRA, Morales explained, grants the Secretary of Health and Human Services the ability to negotiate the price of prescription drugs on behalf of Medicare. …

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Merritt, president of Proactive Strategies Group, said that only about 15% of the $280 billion in savings from the program goes into Medicare. The bulk of the savings, Merritt explained, are going to support the $7,500 electric-vehicle tax credit. …

Melting glaciers to asthma

Over the past decade, climate activists have pushed to make climate change a health-care issue. In 2013, journalist Courtney Subramanian argued in Time that climate change should be rebranded a health issue, because people could connect with fears of infectious diseases and childhood asthma more than they could melting glaciers. …

With the popular merging of concerns about climate change and health issues, the IRA was promoted as a sweeping climate and health care bill. Jeff Reynolds, senior investigative researcher with Restoration of America, told Just The News that the IRA does nothing for health care. “It reminds me a lot of Obamacare. It wasn’t anything they claimed it was going to be,” he said.

Instead of truly lowering drug prices, which are skyrocketing, Reynolds said, the IRA diverts funding into electric vehicles and that the combination of climate change and health issues follows a similar pattern to what was seen during the COVID pandemic, where fears of deadly infections were used by politicians to justify restrictions that were unnecessary and ultimately harmful. …

Minimal impact

The IRA will grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2026 authority for price controls on 10 separate drugs, and over time, that increases to 20. Morales said that these price controls will ultimately disincentivize drug innovations, as it can take 15 years and billions of dollars to develop a drug and bring it to market.

Citing a 2021 University of Chicago study, Morales said the IRA’s price controls will lower research and development on new drugs and result in 135 fewer drugs entering the market. This will, according to the study, result in a loss of 331.5 million life years in the U.S., which is more than the first two years of the pandemic. For cancer treatments alone, the IRA will reduce research and development spending by $18.1 billion annually.