Joe Biden
Joe Biden

If Joe Biden fails to get PR mileage from his Inflation Reduction Act’s provision to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors, he doesn’t deserve to be nominated for a second term.

Actions by drug companies and their lobbyists have barred the government from bargaining over prescription prices.

The result: record profits for Big Pharma and the highest drug prices in the world for the US.

If Biden’s plan to cut the prices of 10 popular drugs in half survives Big Pharma’s court challenge, US taxpayers will save $160B in Medicare costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That is not chump change.

Biden should take a cue from AARP’s chief advocacy and engagement officer Nancy LeaMond who praised his drug plan. “For too long, big drug companies have fleeced our country and padded their profits by setting outrageous prices, all at the expense of American lives,” she said.

She added that the AARP “cannot overstate how monumental this law is for older Americans’ financial stability and overall health.”

The president said lowering the cost of prescriptions is part of “Bidenomics.” He has to make that case to the 65M Americans on Medicare.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade group has vowed to fight Biden every step of the way.

“Giving a single government agency the power to arbitrarily set the price of medicines with little accountability, oversight or input from patients and their doctors will have significant negative consequences long after this administration is gone,” it said.

That’s pretty rich coming from an organization representing members who arbitrarily set the price of their products with zero accountability, oversight or input from their customers for years.

PhRMA said Americans deserve better. It is right. We deserve better than serving as Big Pharma’s cash machine.

Go get `em, Joe.

Looie delivers. Let’s hear it for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, whom The Economist profiled as an “effective and ambitious leader.”

DeJoy, who was a major Donald Trump donor, got off to a rocky start. Conspiracy theorists had predicted that he was put in office to tamper with postal voting in order to throw the 2020 election to Trump. It didn’t happen.

Though DeJoy’s “style can be brash and combative,” he passed many measures that are supported by the left such as better healthcare benefits for workers and guaranteed six-day delivery service, the magazine noted.

The USPS stood tall during the pandemic by delivering more than 750M Covid-19 test kits. DeJoy also sliced mail delivery time by a day from Jan. 2021 to April 2023.

“The slings and arrows Mr. DeJoy suffered during his appointment gave him credibility with the right that a boss who came up through the ranks and was a union member might have lacked,” observed according the Economist.

The USPS is beset by the crash in first-class mail volume from 104B pieces in 2001 to 53B in 2020 and the rise in e-commerce.

DeJoy has unveiled a “Delivering for America” plan that aims to put USPS on a stabler financial footing.

He’s also kept the public’s trust in the USPS, as its favorability rating of 77 percent tops every federal agency except the National Park Service.

Watch out, NPS.

Remote and disengaged. A Gallup report released Aug. 24 found that exclusively remote employees have an eroding connection to the mission or purpose of their organization. Only 28 percent of them feel connected to their employers.

These disconnected workers view their jobs as “gigs” and become generally less productive.

“The pattern of eroding mission and purpose for remote-ready jobs, particularly, speaks to an unintended consequence of physical separation. If not managed intentionally, this can lead to psychological separation,” reports Gallup.

To prevent disconnection, managers need to have one “meaningful conversation” per-week of 10 to 15 minutes with remote workers.

Gallup found that such conversations “develop high-performance relationships more than any other single leadership activity.”

Putting an end to exclusively remote work is another way to build teamwork.