President Donald J. Trump tried to bargain and negotiate with America’s “Big Pharma” to lower the prices of prescription medication in the United States. Those negotiations broke down and today, the President announced he will start to force companies to stop overcharging Americans at the pharmacy for life-saving medications.
The left, of course, is not celebrating. Even if the President cured cancer tomorrow, the left would be out in the streets to protest it. CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets mocked and criticized the new executive order today.
Even though Trump’s executive order is similar to the one Bernie Sanders campaigned on, Sanders was quiet about the order today. Joe Biden ignored it and so did Kamala Harris.
“Americans pay more per capita for prescription drugs than residents of any other developed country in the world. It is unacceptable that Americans pay more for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same places,”
Trump said. “Other countries’ governments regulate drug prices by negotiating with drug manufacturers to secure bargain prices, leaving Americans to make up the difference — effectively subsidizing innovation and lower-cost drugs for the rest of the world. The Council of Economic Advisers has found that Americans finance much of the biopharmaceutical innovation that the world depends on, allowing foreign governments, many of which are the sole healthcare payers in their respective countries, to enjoy bargain prices for such innovations. Americans should not bear extra burdens to compensate for the shortfalls that result from the nationalized public healthcare systems of wealthy countries abroad. ”
Trump said that in addition to being unfair, high drug prices in the United States also have serious economic and health consequences for patients in need of treatment. High prices cause Americans to divert too much of their scarce resources to pharmaceutical treatments and away from other productive uses. High prices are also a reason many patients skip doses of their medications, take less than the recommended doses, or abandon treatment altogether, the President said.
The consequences of these behaviors can be severe. For example, patients may develop acute conditions that result in poor clinical outcomes or that require drastic and expensive medical interventions.
“In most markets, the largest buyers pay the lowest prices, but this has not been true for prescription drugs,” Trump added. “The Federal Government is the largest payer for prescription drugs in the world, but it pays more than many smaller buyers, including other developed nations. When the Federal Government purchases a drug covered by Medicare — the cost of which is shared by American seniors who take the drug and American taxpayers — it should insist on, at a minimum, the lowest price at which the manufacturer sells that drug to any other developed nation.”
According to the executive order he signed today, he declared Medicare subscribers should not pay more for costly Part B or Part D prescription drugs or biological products than the most-favored-nation price.
The order states, to the extent consistent with law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall immediately take appropriate steps to implement his rulemaking plan to test a payment model pursuant to which Medicare would pay, for certain high-cost prescription drugs and biological products covered by Medicare Part B, no more than the most-favored-nation price. The model would test whether, for patients who require pharmaceutical treatment, paying no more than the most-favored-nation price would mitigate poor clinical outcomes and increased expenditures associated with high drug costs.
