If you want to understand why Democrats and their allies are so excited about the prescription drug reforms that President Joe Biden signed on Tuesday , it helps to think about how long they have been trying to put those reforms on the books.

The idea of giving the federal government leverage over pharmaceutical prices goes back decades , at least to the early 1990s when former President Bill Clinton was putting together his ill-fated plan for universal health care. He remembered the stories he had heard on the campaign trail, about average Americans struggling with the costs of medications for conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure or multiple sclerosis, and at one point advisers contemplated a freeze on prices to provide quick, temporary relief.

The Clinton team settled instead on some other proposals, including one that would give the federal government power to negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical companies, who were predictably unhappy about it . Their lobbying against the Clinton plan contributed to its eventual demise, cementing the impression that the drug industry would never lose a big fight over their pricing practices.

Except now it has happened.

A key provision of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the law Biden signed this week, gives the secretary of health and human services authority to negotiate the price of drugs in the Medicare program. And Democrats were able to pass it despite an onslaught from an industry that, according to OpenSecrets.org , spent $187 million on lobbying this year alone.