Obama: GOP driving up healthcare costs

President Obama blames Republicans in Congress for failing to take action against the rising prices of medical treatments and drugs — an area of U.S. healthcare reform that was largely left out of the Affordable Care Act.

{mosads}“There’s certain areas like drugs, where the fact that Congress — and the Republican Party in particular — has been resistant to letting drugmakers and Medicare negotiate for the lowest price. It results in us paying a lot more than we should,” he said in an interview with Vox, published Monday.

When asked why Americans pay more for hospital visits and medications, Obama pointed to a healthcare market that he called “really opaque and really hard to penetrate.”

“Health providers are able to, I think, charge without much fear that somebody’s looking over their shoulders and asking, well, why does this cost that much?” he said.

While he said ObamaCare has helped reduce the country’s healthcare spending to its lowest level in decades, he said there are still more reforms needed, particularly in the drug industry. 

One idea, he said, is allowing private insurers to band together with government programs like Medicare and Medicaid to jointly negotiate prices.

“I think that moving in the direction where consumers and others can have more power in the marketplace, particularly when it comes to drugs, makes a lot of sense,” he said.