President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday aimed at significantly lowering prescription drug prices in the United States. He called it a move to bring “fairness to America” and curb long-standing disparities between US drug costs and those in other nations.
In a public statement, Trump blasted the decades-long issue of Americans paying significantly more for prescription medications than citizens of other countries. He criticized pharmaceutical companies for justifying the price gap with research and development costs, claiming that these expenses have unfairly fallen on Americans alone.
“The Pharmaceutical/Drug Companies would say, for years, that it was Research and Development Costs,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
Trump described the practice as indefensible and announced a policy change that he said will result in immediate savings. The core of the proposal is a “Most Favored Nation” pricing policy, under which the US would match the lowest drug prices paid by any other developed country. This policy would lead to reductions of “30% to 80%” on prescription drugs in the United States.
Among provisions:
The Department of Health and Human Services is directed to facilitate programs that allow Americans to purchase drugs directly from manufacturers at the lowest global price, where legally possible.
The Department of Commerce and US Trade Representative must end foreign pricing policies that undermine US national security or economic fairness.
Within 30 days, HHS and other officials must inform drug manufacturers of price targets to align US prices with those of comparable countries.
If no “significant progress” is made, the president will have these options:
- HHS could propose a rule making plan to enforce MFN pricing.
- Drug importation from countries with lower prices may be authorized under section 804(j) of the FDCA.
- Antitrust enforcement could target any anti-competitive behaviors among manufacturers.
- Commerce and other agencies will consider actions on the export of drug materials tied to price discrimination.
- FDA may review or revoke approvals for drugs deemed unsafe, ineffective, or improperly marketed.
- Agencies will take coordinated action against global pricing schemes that disadvantage American consumers.
“This is something that the Democrats have fought for many years,” Trump said.
He said the change would not only reduce out-of-pocket costs for American patients but also save the federal government trillions of dollars in the long term.
Industry, including pharmaceutical companies, have opposed such actions, which may be met with legal action, as so many of Trump’s executive orders have.
Lower pharma prices has been a campaign promise of the Democrats for decades yet nothing ever improved. Trump didn’t mention big pharma much in his campaign (wise move) and did more today than Democrats have ever done.
I have two friends being kept alive by the extraordinary research of drug companies. One with Multiple Myeloma, and the other with metastatic renal cell carcinoma. Both are getting medications that attack the cancer cells directly without the toxic side effects we saw with old chemotherapy.
Those advances came from research, expensive research. That happened when private companies set their prices in a free market.
Trump, the Democrat, is against free markets.
You are saying that predatory pricing should be ok because your friends have cancer?
You write like a drug rep. How many clinic lunches are you buying this month?
I’m guessing it’s as many as will let you in.
Clam, in the USA, about 1.8 million people get cancer every year. About 600,000 of them will die.
If a company spends billion on research to discover a new drug, then that is a huge benefit, esp. if it cures your cancer. These companies do this because it is supposed to be a free market and they get to enjoy the rewards of their labor. But you socialist Trump people don’t want free markets, now do you? Kill the free market, and see how many companies will invest billions in research that they can not recover.
Do you happen to know how much your friend is paying for that medication?
Or is it one of those bottles that they charge $2500 for here in the US and can be bought outside the US for $300?
That is the “free market” DJT is targeting which actually means a free market to charge any amount they feel like with no regulation.
It has been a sham for many years and nobody has touched it because like Pelosi most politicians are heavily invested in big pharma companies doing the scamming.
So you have 2 parasites you call friends who are dependent on the price gouging of others so the research can benefit them. Not a very good take there N.
Perhaps maybe look into the billions of dollars that have been donated through fund raising over the past couple decades and ask yourself, with all that money, why hasn’t the system progressed further beyond just treatment of the symptoms instead of understanding the source of the disease?
Why do your friends have such poor health in the first place and how is it the responsibility of everyone else to incur the costs to benefit your two sick friends who made poor health choices in life?
If your friends health is so important to you, then you find a way to fund it. Stop leeching of the rest of us.
Anti- you are not making a bit of sense. Go to school and learn basic business, then report back when you are less ignorant.
Please explain how the people in other countries can pay significantly less for those same drugs. Are they not contributing to the cost of that expensive research? If not why not?
Remdesivir is the covid drug Fauci and foes were pushing during the pandemic which is a byproduct of a pharmaceutical company brought to by Donald Rumsfeld.
The only side effects were acute Kidney injury with renal impairment as well as total renal failure.
It was also bought at a high price and widely used by the govt to treat covid patients at their risk of side effects.
Andy, yep, one friend pays $43,000 per dose. He has insurance, and he has worked his whole life. He’d be dead (like thousands of others) if this cure was never invented because some socialist guy like Trump took away the profit motive that enables these cures.
In time the cost comes down, as the companies that spent billions to come up with these cures EARN enough to pay off their investment.
At $43,000 per dose I am sure the cost will level off to just a modest profit margin once they have EARNed enough to cover their investment. LOL
Without any repercussions to the insurance industry or its clients as well.
Which drug company are you lobbying for?
Oh Andy, aren’t you the sweetest little socialist.
You want to take what other people have worked for, using government.
Sorry about your two friends, N. Yes, one must favor the ‘free-market’ research for new medications. However, you have not addressed the unfairness in Big Pharma’s practice of overcharging us Americans by factors of 2-3 when compared with the price that Big Pharma charges the people (or the governments) of other developed nations.
But I’m guessing that you just don’t like President Trump. In which case, you have no case to make
While I feel for your two friends, I believe the cost of R&D should be spread across the whole globe and not be the burden of the US citizens. That is want DJT placed in his EO. The country with the lowest price shall be the price Big Pharma can charge here in the US.
Think of it like oil. Should the price be a global price or should the oil companies be allowed to charge the US consumer a higher price than other countries to recoup the exploration cost?
LBM, well, you probably don’t want the critical cancer meds you need to live made in some moldy factory in India… Or are you willing to pay more for a clean factory, and meds that don’t have mold or other contaminates in them? Or worse, counterfeit meds?
TDS is real – can’t even make this sh// up anymore
N – please take your Covid booster, it’s for the seniors and children – do your duty.
Remember, boys and girls, Biden could have done the same thing had he really cared about United States citizens as much as he loved illegals. But, boy could he rant and rave about big Pharma. The rants didn’t make much sense, but the were rants nonetheless.
Hasalaska, in a free market, you have a choice. If you don’t want to buy something, you don’t have to.
Apparently what you want is a free ride. Socialist, much?
Americans also pay more than people in India do for cars, rent, food, livestock etc…. So we should artificially control those markets too? Let’s make Amazon force sellers to charge the same to sell a product in the US as they do in Vietnam? Maybe we should force all grocery stores to sell avocados for the same price that they cost in Mexico. It’s really unfair that I can’t get all my meds for cheap when I eat like crap, don’t exercise, smoke, etc. Come on. Love how the free market people are screaming yeah Trump on this. Prices are commiserate with the cost of living etc. While we are at it let’s make sure that we cap what providers can make so that it’s more like what it cost to go the doctor in Canada. Now I will wait for everyone to argue how they want this aspect of socialized medicine but all other aspects are bad. Good grief.
N & DF, the question you never answered is this: Why can I go to Canada, Mexico, Thailand, and a host of other countries and purchase the exact same drug as I purchase in America yet spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars more? It is the exact same drug. This is what Trump is addressing.
Reread my post and educate yourself on how medicine are available around the world and how they are not. Not all meds that you get in the US are available for dirt cheap in all countries. Many take years to come out other places and maybe one choice in a whole class is even available if at all. Feel free to pay for a flight to Thailand, Mexico, India or Canada every 90 days. Hope the meds you come home with aren’t counterfeits. Outside of some developed countries that subside their healthcare and meds with major taxes, most countries where drugs are cheap also have most other things for cheap. You want the quality of life of the US with the cost of cheap drugs from India. You want to be able to access world class surgeries and safe medical procedures where no one says no to you if you are fat and a smoker but pay very little for meds. So it’s ok to have the government control things as long as it’s what you want them to control? Why then don’t we require people to carry health insurance and make it affordable to buy it? Good preventative care prevents a lot of medicine usage down the line. Either way this reeks of price controls etc. this is literally anti free market and straight up socialized medicine. Doing this for meds without fixing medical bills and bankruptcy from unpaid bills is like putting a piece of gum on a bucket filled shot full of holes and is grandstanding.
P, private companies, in a free world, get to run their companies without government dictating the price they sell their product for. The United States used to celebrate freedom. The rest of the world, not so much.
Really, really ironic that this dinosaur thinks he can go in and with a thick black marker and ‘solve’ a pharmaceutical matter when the underlying issue is the health insurance industry; how much they compensate the stockbrokers in the shark-infested waters of ‘healthcare’, and the corporate stockholders parsing out the dollars from those employees paying taxes to the government funding the whole imbroglio. This is just more ‘infrastructure day’ malarky deja vu all over again. So, what sort of grift is he trying to distract us from this time?
The NIH funds most medical research. The universities and drug companies who formulate new drugs on the US taxpayers’ dime are then allowed to patent the drug. They turn around and charge the US taxpayer AGAIN via insane prices charged to Medicare, Medicaid and health insurance companies. The drug companies then go overseas and give the drugs away. This is all insanity the US citizens get screwed to subsidize the rest of the world. Socialized medicine in ROW is already a disaster … Imagine if they had to pay on par with the US for access to pharmaceuticals? Why doesn’t the US taxpayer get subsidized via royalties from the drug research they paid for?
The entire system is corrupt. To those who will screech about medical research saving cancer patients you need to understand that pharma is never going to cure cancer they just want to “manage” it. A dead patient is no longer a customer a DEPENDENT patient is a valued long term customer. THIS is the reason there is no cure for cancer…. unless you know about Fenbendazole and Ivermectin. Read in to Gilead… They cured Hepatitis and it almost destroyed the company since they cured everyone and ran out of customers!