Center for American Progress offers plan to improve Medicare

The Center for American Progress has put forward a proposal to make changes within Medicare aimed at helping users, including instituting consumer-friendly ratings of the benefits new drugs may have, limiting what patients must pay for new drugs and requiring pharmaceutical companies to disclose how much is actually spent on researching and bringing new drugs to market, the Associated Press said.

The Center for American Progress typically has been aligned with positions taken by the Obama administration, and this proposal is intended to gain the attention of 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who are both on the record as advocating against overpriced medications, AP said.

While the pharmaceutical industry is expected to object to these measures, the proposal has been modified in hopes of garnering Republican support.

"We've been talking about Medicare negotiation...for many, many years and gotten nowhere," Topher Spiro, a resident policy expert with the Center for American Progress, told AP. "We wanted to change the dynamic."

AP said a recent poll found 72 percent of Americans said the cost of prescription drugs is unreasonable.