Preserving Patient Access to Long-Term Care Pharmacies Act
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Sen. Lankford, James [R-OK]
ID: L000575
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Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, brought to you by the esteemed members of Congress. Let's dissect this farce and expose the underlying disease.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Preserving Patient Access to Long-Term Care Pharmacies Act (S 3159) claims to ensure that long-term care pharmacies receive adequate reimbursement for dispensing certain medications to Medicare patients. How noble. In reality, this bill is a thinly veiled attempt to line the pockets of pharmacy owners and their lobbyists.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends the Social Security Act to provide temporary supply fees to long-term care pharmacies for plan years 2026 and 2027. These fees will be paid by Medicare Part D sponsors and Medicare Advantage organizations, with amounts ranging from $30 in 2026 to an inflation-adjusted rate in 2027. The bill also establishes a repayment mechanism for these fees, ensuring that the government foots the bill.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The main beneficiaries of this bill are long-term care pharmacies and their owners, who will receive increased reimbursement rates. Medicare Part D sponsors and Medicare Advantage organizations will bear the initial costs, but the government will ultimately reimburse them. Patients may see some benefits in terms of access to medications, but this is merely a secondary effect.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a classic example of regulatory capture, where special interest groups (in this case, pharmacy owners and lobbyists) manipulate the legislative process to secure favorable treatment. The increased reimbursement rates will likely lead to higher costs for Medicare and taxpayers, while providing little tangible benefit to patients. The repayment mechanism ensures that the government will absorb these costs, further exacerbating the fiscal irresponsibility of our elected officials.
In conclusion, this bill is a symptom of a deeper disease: the corrupting influence of special interest groups on our legislative process. It's a cynical ploy to enrich pharmacy owners at the expense of taxpayers, masquerading as a patient-centric initiative. As I always say, "Everyone lies." In this case, the sponsors and supporters of S 3159 are lying about their true intentions, and we're all being played for fools.
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Sen. Lankford, James [R-OK]
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
â 465 â Department of Health and Human Services 1. Make Medicare Advantage the default enrollment option. 2. Give beneficiaries direct control of how they spend Medicare dollars. 3. Remove burdensome policies that micromanage MA plans. 4. Replace the complex formula-based payment model with a competitive bidding model. 5. Reconfigure the current risk adjustment model. 6. Remove restrictions on key benefits and services, including those related to prescription drugs, hospice care, and medical savings account plans.26 Legacy Medicare Reform. Legislation reforming legacy (non-MA) Medicare should: l Base payments on the health status of the patient or intensity of the service rather than where the patient happens to receive that service. l Replace the bureaucrat-driven fee-for-service system with value- based payments to empower patients to find the care that best serves their needs. l Codify price transparency regulations. l Restructure 340B drug subsidies27 toward beneficiaries rather than hospitals. l Repeal harmful health policies enacted under the Obama and Biden Administrations such as the Medicare Shared Savings Program28 and Inflation Reduction Act.29 Medicare Part D Reform. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) created a drug price negotiation program in Medicare that replaced the existing private-sector negotiations in Part D with government price controls for prescription drugs. These government price controls will limit access to medications and reduce patient access to new medication. This ânegotiationâ program should be repealed, and reforms in Part D that will have meaningful impact for seniors should be pursued. Other reforms should include eliminating the coverage gap in Part D, reducing the government share in â 466 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise the catastrophic tier, and requiring manufacturers to bear a larger share. Until the IRA is repealed, an Administration that is required to implement it must do so in a way that is prudent with its authority, minimizing the harmful effects of the lawâs policies and avoiding even worse unintended consequences.30 Medicaid. Over the past 45 years, Medicaid and the health safety net have evolved into a cumbersome, complicated, and unaffordable burden on nearly every state. The program is failing some of the most vulnerable patients; is a prime target for waste, fraud, and abuse; and is consuming more of state and federal budgets. The dramatic increase in Medicaid expenditures is due in large part to the ACA (Obamacare), which mandates that states must expand their Medicaid eligibility standards to include all individuals at or below 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL), and the public health emergency, which has prohibited states from performing basic eligibility reviews. The overlap of available benefits among the various health agencies has led to a complex, confusing system that is nearly impossible to navigateâeven for recipients. Recipients are often faced with a âwelfare cliffâ of benefit losses as they earn above a certain amount, which is contrary to the fundamental purpose of empowering individuals to achieve economic independence. Benefits increasingly involve nonmedical services such as air conditioning and housing, many of which are already handled by departments other than HHS. Improper payments within Medicaid are higher than those of any other federal program. These payments are evidence of the inappropriateness of Medicaidâs expansion, which, stemming largely from public health emergency maintenance of effort (MOE) requirements and the Affordable Care Act, has crowded out the primary targets of these programs: those who are most in need. True health care reform cannot be accomplished in a bureaucratic silo or only through Medicaid and health safety net programs. Reform of the tax code is also essential to genuine, effective reform of our health care system. All components of the health care system should be part of the reform efforts, and it is imperative that the system be modified to assist states with their current programs. Therefore, the next Administration should: l Reform financing. Allow states to have a more flexible, accountable, predictable, transparent, and efficient financing mechanism to deliver medical services. This system should include a more balanced or blended match rate, block grants, aggregate caps, or per capita caps. Any financial system should be designed to encourage and incentivize innovation and the efficient delivery of health care services. Federal and state financial participation in the Medicaid program should be rational, predictable, and reasonable. It should also incentivize states to save money and improve the quality of health care.
Introduction
â 283 â Section Three THE GENERAL WELFARE When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government w ould âpromote the general Welfare,â they could not have fathomed a m assive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single yearâroughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aloneâthe belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state. HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020âaccording to the American Main Street Initia- tiveâs analysis of official federal talliesâMedicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem. HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsibleâalong with President Joe Bidenâfor the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trialsâ the gold standard of medical researchâthat masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable â 284 â Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise âobservational studies,â and declared that everyone except children and infants below the age of two should don masks. Under COVID, as former director of HHSâs Office of Civil Rights Roger Severino writes in Chapter 14, the CDC exposed itself as âperhaps the most incompetent and arrogant agency in the federal government.â Nor is the CDC the only villain in this play. Severino writes of the National Institutes of Health, âDespite its popular image as a benign science agency, NIH was responsible for paying for research in aborted baby body parts, human animal chimera experimentsââin which the genes of humans and animals are mixed, âand gain-of-function viral research that may have been responsible for COVID-19.â Severino writes that âAnthony Fauciâs division of the NIHââthe National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseasesââowns half the patent for the Moderna COVID- 19 vaccine,â and âseveral NIH employeesâ receive âup to $150,000 annually from Moderna vaccine sales.â That would be the same experimental mRNA vaccine that the CDC now wants to force on children, who are at little to no risk from COVID-19 but at great risk from public health officials. The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makersâwith all of the conflict of interest it entailsâcannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, âFunding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.â Whatâs more, NIH has long âbeen at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.â The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the departmentâs foray into woke transgen- der activism. HHS also pushes abortion as a form of âhealth care,â skirting and sometimes blatantly defying the Hyde Amendment in the process. Severino writes that the âFDA shouldâŚreverse its approval of chemical abortion drugs because the polit- icized approval process was illegal from the start.â In addition, HHS programs often violate the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of conscience-protection laws. Severino writes that the HHS âSecretary should pursue a robust agenda to pro- tect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology.â The next secretary should also reverse the Biden Administrationâs focus on ââLGBTQ+ equity,â subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage,â replacing such policies with those encouraging marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families. If there is another department that has gone off the rails like HHS during the Obama and Biden Administrations, it is the once proud Department of Justice (DOJ). As former counselor to the attorney general Gene Hamilton writes in Chap- ter 17, the department âhas a long and noble historyââEdmund Randolph, the first attorney general, took office the same year as President Washingtonâyet its
Introduction
â 283 â Section Three THE GENERAL WELFARE When our Founders wrote in the Constitution that the federal government w ould âpromote the general Welfare,â they could not have fathomed a m assive bureaucracy that would someday spend $3 trillion in a single yearâroughly the sum, combined, spent by the departments covered in this section in 2022. Approximately half of that colossal sum was spent by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) aloneâthe belly of the massive behemoth that is the modern administrative state. HHS is home to Medicare and Medicaid, the principal drivers of our $31 trillion national debt. When Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law these programs, they were set on autopilot with no plan for how to pay for them. The first year that Medicare spending was visible on the books was 1967. From that point on through 2020âaccording to the American Main Street Initia- tiveâs analysis of official federal talliesâMedicare and Medicaid combined cost $17.8 trillion, while our combined federal deficits over that same span were $17.9 trillion. In essence, our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem. HHS is also home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the duo most responsibleâalong with President Joe Bidenâfor the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic. All along, it was clear from randomized controlled trialsâ the gold standard of medical researchâthat masks provide little to no benefit in preventing the spread of viruses and might even be counterproductive. Yet the CDC ignored these high-quality RCTs, cherry-picked from politically malleable
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.