Individualized letters have gone out to 17 major pharmaceutical companies from President Trump, demanding that they cut their drug prices in the US. If they don't agree to comply by Sept. 29, the president told them he'll "deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices," CNBC reports. The administration said trade policy will be used to support manufacturers raising global prices to match US prices, per the Hill, provided the higher revenue is put back into reducing prices for Americans. Still, stock prices immediately fell for drugmakers.
Trump specified these steps for the companies, per CNBC:
- Price matching: Offer their full portfolio of medications at the lowest price already set in other developed nations to every US Medicaid patient. Trump refers to that as the most favored nation price.
- New medicine: Contract with the government to ensure that Medicare, Medicaid and commercial payers pay most favored nation prices on all new drugs, starting with their debut.
- Better deals: Negotiate harder with what he called "foreign freeloading nations." Trump said that effort will be aided by trade policy.
- Direct sales: Adopt models that sell their medicines directly to consumers or businesses, which effectively eliminates middlemen and aims to ensure that all Americans get the same most-favored nation prices that companies offer to third-party payers.
Trump's letters, per the Hill, went to AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Regeneron, and Sanofi. In the past, the trade group PhRMA has said most favored nation plans are a form of government price-setting that could affect federal health programs, per Axios.
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