CASM Members Keep the Pressure On: A Summer of Free-Market Advocacy

By Andrew Langer

Members of the Coalition Against Socialized Medicine (CASM) didn’t let the summer season slow their momentum in advancing market-driven healthcare reforms to address rising out-of-pocket costs and continue protecting patient choice. Across countless issue areas, our members have engaged and advocated for free market solutions.

Over the past few months, our members have weighed in on a wide range of healthcare issues, making the case directly to lawmakers and regulators: capitalist, free-market policies will lower healthcare costs and increase domestic R&D. This includes ending foreign freeloading on American medical innovation through a Section 301 investigation, applauding the launch of the revised 340B Rebate Model Pilot Program, pushing back against the implementation and expansion of IRA Medicare price controls, calling out AARP’s lucrative financial relationship with UnitedHealthcare (UHC), advocating for the EPIC Act to repeal the Biden-era “Pill Penalty,” and continuing to press for pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) reform.

In recently released reports, submitted comments, published statements, op-eds, letters to Congress, and even a feature in RealClearHealth’s new podcast, CASM members have made clear that these issue areas, though distinct from one another, work in conjunction. As they’ve outlined, ending the free ride on innovation means pharmaceutical companies would see returns on their investments, funding the next generation of treatments. But that innovation will only reach patients if the rest of the system works as it should. That’s why we have consistently called for PBM reform, 340B accountability, and an end to the nefarious partnership between AARP and UHC, since these are all pieces of the same, bigger puzzle.

Across this work, there was one concern that kept surfacing: threats to the free-market system. Proposals to expand government intervention in healthcare, whether through price controls or other top-down mandates, risk undermining patient choice and disrupting market competition, and with them, the innovation that has long defined American medicine. As our members have reiterated time and again, patients are best served by a system that rewards competition, not one that restricts it.

CASM members know this work is far from over, which is why we’ve kept the pressure on. As the country enters a critical election cycle, our members will remain on the offense, holding policymakers, both incumbents and candidates, to a standard that protects patients and defends free-market principles.