In blink-and-miss-it moment, Harris vows to expand OOP cap

In the first hour and a half of what was scheduled to be an hour and a half presidential debate, the pharma industry came up precisely zero times. Even in an extended and animated early back and forth on abortion rights, neither the moderators nor candidates asked about medication abortion, as they did in the fateful Biden-Trump debate in June.

But at around an hour and 31 minutes in, Vice President Harris finally talked about the Medicare drug pricing negotiation provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act - although, confusingly, it was during a conversation about the Affordable Care Act, the landmark Obama-era law dealing with health insurance.

"We have allowed for the first time for Medicare to negotiate drug prices on behalf of you, the American people," Harris said. "Donald Trump said he was going to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. He never did. We did."

But Harris went beyond boasting about the administration's accomplishments (and thankfully managed to avoid claiming to have "beaten Medicare"). She vowed, as Biden did in June, to expand the $2,000 per year out of pocket medication cost for seniors, another provision of the IRA, to cover all seniors and not just those insured under Medicare.

"And now we have capped the cost of insulin at $35 a month," Harris said. "Since I've become Vice President, we have capped the cost of prescription medication for seniors at $2,000 a year and when I am President we will do that for all people, understanding that the value I bring to this is that access to healthcare should be a right and not just a privilege of those who can afford it."

For his part, President Trump didn't speak to drug prices at all. Unlike in June, where he responded to Biden by taking credit for the insulin cap, this time Trump's remarks were focused on the ACA (in fairness, the original topic at hand).

"Obamacare was lousy healthcare," he said. "Always was. It's not very good today. And what I said, that if we come up with something and we are working on things, we're going to do it and we're going to replace it."

Asked by a moderator if he in fact had a plan to replace Obamacare, Trump said he had "concepts of a plan".

Healthcare was not a major topic of the debate. In addition to the aforementioned abortion back-and-forth, the two candidates briefly sparred on Trump's COVID response, but the conversation didn't tread any new ground. In a discussion of the failed border bill, Harris briefly mentioned the opioid epidemic.

Generally, the Vice President's strategy in the debate was to focus on values and policy plans and to exude positivity and hope, drawing a contrast with Trump's pension for blame, name-calling, and increasingly unhinged falsehoods. The strategy seemed to work, with Trump repeating obviously false - and debunked - claims about immigrants eating pets and Democrats favouring abortion after birth.