Trump targets pharmaceutical firms - Proposes lowering prices of American drugs
Drugmakers have been warned that the Trump administration is considering lowering drug prices in the United States, bringing them closer to the low prices paid in other developed countries, according to two company sources, who called the option the pharmaceutical industry's top concern.
Both sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said they expected the policy to come from the agency that oversees the Medicare and Medicaid health programs.
The first source said government health officials had told him directly that they were considering such a policy, which he described as a mid-level priority for the Trump Administration as it tries to lower drug prices.
According to the companies, any such policy was more worrisome to the industry than other government moves, including tariffs on imported drugs. The first source said it was "the biggest existential threat to the US bioscience industry and innovation."
Industry trade group PhRMA earlier this year lobbied Congress on the issue, sometimes called international benchmark pricing, according to government records.
The United States is the country that pays the most for drugs in the world, often nearly three times more than other developed countries. President Donald Trump has said he wants to reduce this gap, but has not publicly specified how he would do so. In his first term, Trump's proposed international benchmark pricing program was blocked by a court.
Trump's sweeping proposal five years ago was expected to save taxpayers more than $85 billion over seven years, cutting annual U.S. spending on drugs by more than $400 billion.
Trump has not publicly raised the idea of benchmark pricing since taking office, but the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute has. In a widely circulated paper last month, the group said the policy could be implemented within Medicare drug pricing negotiations.
Former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act allows the government to negotiate the price of its most expensive drugs. The prices for the top 10 prescription drugs it negotiated were still on average more than double, and in some cases five times, what drugmakers in four other high-income countries had agreed to, Reuters reported. The benchmark price was missing from Trump’s health care executive order last week, but one analyst said that by giving the government guidance on how to ensure better value for Medicare-covered drugs, it could have opened the door to such a policy.
The Trump administration will face an uphill battle in implementing a proposal, even a limited one, according to experts.
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