President Biden’s message about reducing the cost of prescription drugs through the Inflation Reduction Act is resonating with more people, but the majority of voters overall are still unaware of some key provisions, according to a new poll from the research group on health policy KFF.
Reducing healthcare costs has been a key re-election message for Biden, and he touted the passage of the IRA as a landmark achievement.
Awareness of the 2-year law is highest among voters age 65 and older, a group that is mostly covered by Medicare and tends to vote at higher rates than younger adults.
O survey found that 52 percent of older voters are aware of the $35 IRA limit on insulin for people with Medicare, compared to 44 percent in November. Among all voters, only 35 percent said they were aware of the limit, which is still an increase from 28 percent in November.
About 48 percent of older voters said they were aware of a law that requires the federal government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs for Medicare enrollees, while about a third of all voters correctly said the same.
Awareness of the IRA’s other Medicare drug pricing provisions has not changed significantly among all voters since November, but there has been an increase in awareness of some provisions among Democratic voters and older voters, the poll noted.
This increase may be an encouraging sign that messages about the IRA’s successes may be reaching some groups, but the low overall awareness shows the challenges the campaign faces.
Most bipartisan voters said they support Biden’s proposals to extend some of the IRA’s drug provisions to cover all adults with private insurance, including capping monthly insulin costs and imposing a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs. .
However, most voters are generally pessimistic about what either candidate would be able to accomplish in the area of drug pricing if elected.
The poll gave Biden a slight edge among independent voters, as about half said his administration’s policies are likely to lower prescription drug costs if he is elected. About 4 in 10 said the same about former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
But neither candidate had a clear lead in addressing high health care costs, as 38% of voters said they trusted Biden and 36% said they trusted Trump.
The survey was conducted from April 23 to May 1 among a nationally representative sample of 1,479 U.S. adults. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points and is plus or minus 4 percentage points for registered voters.
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