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On a Sunday afternoon in August, Stacie Dusetzina, a health services researcher, sat alone in Vanderbilt In the office of Bilt University, looking at C-SPAN and crying.
The U.S. Senate is voting on the Reducing Inflation Act, which aims to ensure that people on Medicare pay less for expensive drugs.
This is a big deal. Many seniors pay $10,000 or more a year for drugs or don’t get life-saving treatments; once the new law goes into effect, it will set a $2,000 annual out-of-pocket limit.
Dusetzina and her colleagues have been defending the change for years, documenting the ways in which current policies have trapped people.
The pharmaceutical industry has struggled with this change for decades. Julie Rovner, KHN’s chief Washington correspondent, takes the audience back to the late 1980s, when Congress learned the cost of dealing with Big Pharma.
“An Arm and a Leg” is a joint production of KHN and Public Road Productions.
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