Thirty-four minutes: That's how long Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden appeared side by side at a rally in Maryland, just outside Washington, DC, on Thursday, August 15, including their speeches. It was the first time they had appeared together since the 81-year-old president stood down as the Democratic candidate against Donald Trump. The atmosphere was overexcited, with Biden giving the impression of never having been so popular as when he was pushed out by his party-mates.
Harris presented him as "the most extraordinary human being" while Biden said of his vice president: "She can make one hell of a president." In short, a staging of reconciliation, or at any rate, an understanding between Democrats, at an event organized around an "easy" subject for Democrats, the setting of a ceiling price on drugs by Medicare, the federal health insurance for the elderly.
In a historic aberration due to lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, Medicare had no right to negotiate drug prices, having to buy drugs for its insured at list price. This is no longer the case, thanks to a bill passed at the beginning of Biden's term of office and adopted by the Senate thanks to the decisive vote of the vice president, who was thereby given prominence, while all the Republican senators voted against.
The implications have become even more concrete since the White House announced on Friday morning the list of drugs concerned. A dozen or so drugs, affecting from 23,000 to nearly four million elderly people, treating diabetes, blood cancer, osteoarthritis or blood pressure, whose prices will be divided by two to four starting in 2026. "Kamala and all of us in this room are going to keep standing up to Big Pharma. I fought too damn hard to yield now," asserted Biden, who denounced the $400 million spent by pharmaceutical groups on lobbying in 2023.
Harris, who made no real speech and merely introduced the president, could only approve. But she refrained from addressing other aspects of his economic policy, reserving her announcements for one of her own rallies in North Carolina on Friday. "Thank you Joe," chanted the crowd as the president ironized his age: "I've served in the Senate for 270 years," joked Biden, adding that he had been criticized when first elected to the Senate for being "too young" at the age of 29 and is now considered "too old." In reality, Biden still thinks he could have won the November election and, according to the New York Times, he hasn't spoken about it again since he renounced Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House of Representatives and real boss of the Democrats, who pushed him out in July.
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