The White House is touting a deal with pharmaceutical companies to shave $6 billion off Medicare costs by 2026, a move they say will save $1.5 billion for seniors. The headlines will score political points, but a less sunny prognosis is taking shape: More pain tomorrow for promises of relief today.

In a victory lap on Thursday, President Biden touted reducing the cost of ten drugs. “We finally beat Big Pharma,” he said. A White House statement credited the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. It empowered Medicare “to negotiate prescription drug prices,” legislation “signed into law by President Biden with Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.” 

As the high of the announcement wears off, expect Ms. Harris to seek distance from this policy as she has so many of Mr. Biden’s initiatives. Price controls — the essence of the Medicare deal — may be popular in the short term, but they always have unintended consequences in the market.

The Inflation Reduction Act discarded “decades of bipartisan consensus surrounding the U.S. medicine market to embark on an unproven price-setting experiment,” two former Trump Administration officials, Joe Grogan and John Czwartacki, now with the Health Market and Policy Network, said in an e-mail to the Sun.  

Mr. Grogan, who ran the Domestic Policy Council, and Mr. Czwartacki, a former aide in the Office of Management and Budget, wrote that they “understand the temptation to see” the drug deal “as a win. But the evidence continues to mount that there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

While Mr. Biden criticized the “exorbitant” profits of “Big Pharma,” he ignored how that money funds the search for new cures and treatments. A life sciences firm, IQVIA, which tracks clinical research, found that companies had reduced spending on research and development by 22 percent since 2021. This impacts all Americans, whether they’re on Medicare or not.

Along with the price-negotiating power, the Inflation Reduction Act imposed an “inflation tax” on Medicare. It was estimated that, together, they’d save $266 billion through 2031. However, the American Action Forum noted in October that since Medicare “is part of the unified federal budget,” there’s no corresponding benefit to recipients.

“The savings the IRA will produce,” the forum wrote, “will be offset — indeed, outweighed — by the law’s $670 billion in clean energy tax credits and other spending on energy and the environment” alone “and even leave a residual to be borrowed” to keep Medicare solvent.

In his 2000 run for president, the publisher of Forbes, Malcolm “Steve” Forbes, likened the Treasury to a pot of honey and politicians to bears. “You know what happens when they put a big pot of money in Washington, D.C.” he said. “The political animals can’t help it. They have to spend it. It’s their nature.”

The Inflation Reduction Act also tried to fix Medicare by increasing the liability of insurers. As a result, premiums for prescription drug plans “skyrocketed from $64.28 in 2024 to $179.45 in 2025,” the Paragon Health Institute wrote earlier this month.

Look for Medicare Part D premiums to follow suit. Far from being flush with cash, Part D is deep in the red, prompting the Biden Administration to launch a rescue package last month — another band-aid for a chronic problem.

“The Biden Administration,” Paragon wrote, “is using billions of taxpayer dollars to cynically bail out insurers to buy down seniors’ premiums just months before an election.” Prior to his 2012 campaign, President Obama used similar tricks with Medicare Advantage, a move the Government Accountability Office said raised “legal concerns.”

Medicare has been plagued by overruns from the start. It was introduced in 1966 with a price tag of $3 billion. The Congressional Budget Office projected that figure would be just $12 billion by 1990, accounting for inflation. Instead, it cost $107 billion, almost nine times that much.

Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris know that Medicare is popular and that pharmaceutical companies make easy targets. But seniors care little for political games. They’re about to get mauled by high costs, having been promised honey at election time by bears far better suited to selling snake oil.