President Joe Biden recently invited Sen. Bernie Sanders to the White House to celebrate their supposed “victory” over “Big Pharma.” They focused on the Inflation Reduction Act, which imposed price controls on prescription medicines.

But on that issue, neither of the two men — nor American patients — have much to celebrate.

The IRA’s unprecedented drug price-setting provisions have already had a chilling effect on the development of new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and countless other chronic illnesses.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Biden signaled his intention to expand the policy. “I think we should be more aggressive,” he said. But broadening his reckless, destructive reform would only deprive the world of more groundbreaking treatments and cures.

The IRA gives the Department of Health and Human Services sweeping authority to dictate the price that Medicare pays for 10 brand-name drugs starting in 2026, with an increasing number to be added each year.

Democrats pushed hard for these reforms despite warnings from patient advocates, biotech firms, and policy experts that price controls would destroy any financial incentive to invest in new drug research. Already, biopharmaceutical companies have said that they’re reprioritizing, slowing research, or sidelining drugs altogether due to IRA provisions.

This shift is only going to accelerate. A recent study by the healthcare consultancy VitalTransformation estimates that “as many as 139 drugs over the next 10 years are at risk of not being developed at all” as a consequence of the IRA. Similarly, the economist Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago calculated that IRA-style price controls would deprive the world of 135 potential new cures before 2040.

This slowdown in medical progress shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that price controls make it harder for new medicines to earn back their research and development costs. Discovering new drugs was already high-risk, costing billions of dollars and many years to develop a single new medicine. Now, investors have even less incentive to bet on the next big potential breakthrough. Indeed, Philipson projects that investment in drug research and development will decline by $663 billion by 2040 due to the IRA — a drop of more than 18%.

Biden and his allies claim that price controls are a win for patients. But the chief purpose of their reform is not to help individual Americans, but rather, to save money on Medicare, so that it can be repurposed to finance other Democratic spending priorities.

As former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin recently pointed out, the IRA is supposed to generate $266 billion in Medicare savings — an amount completely consumed by the law’s green-energy tax credits.

In other words, Biden and Bernie didn’t “beat” the drug industry in the way they think they did. They certainly haven’t helped patients. Instead, they’ve made it considerably more difficult for drug companies to invent life-saving technologies, cure disease, and respond quickly to the next global health crisis.

Yet Biden’s “more aggressive” plan is already starting to take shape. He himself called for new price controls on at least 50 drugs a year, five times the number currently allowed. And Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., have introduced the so-called SMART Prices Act. It would reduce the amount of time after FDA approval before a new drug becomes eligible for price controls.

Another study from VitalTransformation concludes that the SMART Prices Act, combined with existing price controls, “could result in roughly 230 fewer FDA approvals of new medicines over a ten-year period.”

Any loss of new medicines could spell tragedy on a massive scale. America’s biopharmaceutical companies remain the best defense we have against any global health catastrophe and our greatest hope for curing the most debilitating diseases.

Drug development isn’t the only area where the IRA is threatening patients’ access to care. Average monthly premiums for Medicare Part D prescription drug plans are up a staggering 21% from last year. Some analysts forecast a nearly 50% increase in 2025. Meanwhile, the number of stand-alone drug plans available for Medicare beneficiaries to choose from is at an all-time low.

Biden and Bernie may think they’ve won a political victory in passing the IRA, and they’re clearly determined to double down. But in the long run, they’re only hurting the very Americans they say they want to help.

Peter J. Pitts, a former FDA associate commissioner, is president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.