President Trump is trying to revive a 2016 campaign promise to control the rising price of medicines, but new executive orders are coming when he needs drugmakers to deliver coronavirus treatments.
President Trump signed a slate of executive orders on Friday targeting the high price of prescription drugs, including a still tentative plan to tie the price that Medicare pays for some drugs to the low prices that foreign countries pay. The orders, which alone cannot change policy, recall pledges Mr. Trump made as far back as the 2016 campaign to tackle prescription drug costs, even if it means beating back opposition from the pharmaceutical industry and his own political party. But this announcement, staged in front of a mock pharmacy, with blue bins full of white pill bottles, comes at a delicate time. Mr. Trump has placed billions of dollars in bets that giant drugmakers like Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson will deliver coronavirus treatments and vaccines in time to bolster his faltering re-election campaign. He needs those companies to produce and to participate in his celebrations of their achievements, even as he is attacking them over the price of their other products. Mr. Trump may have nodded to that sensitivity when he said he would delay enforcement of the most aggressive of his proposed policies until after a meeting with pharmaceutical executives scheduled for Tuesday at the White House, giving them until Aug.24 to “come up with something” before moving forward. Stephen J. Ubl, the president and chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the main trade group for the industry, noted Mr. Trump’s dilemma. “In the middle of a global pandemic, when nearly 145,000 Americans have lost their lives and millions of others have suffered untold economic hardships, this administration has decided to pursue a radical and dangerous policy to set prices based on rates paid in countries that he has labeled as socialist,” Mr. Ubl said in a statement. The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s event was a vague proposal that could tie the price that Medicare pays for drugs administered by doctors to prices negotiated by foreign governments. The White House released no details about how the policy would be devised. The president has called for such a system since 2018, railing against drug companies for ripping off Americans. “Under our ridiculous system, which has been broken for decades, we aren’t even allowed to negotiate the price of drugs. Can you believe it?” he said on Friday, describing the Medicare prescription drug law passed in 2003 by a Republican Congress during the George W. Bush administration. But the earlier proposal has sputtered in the face of resistance from the pharmaceutical industry and Republican lawmakers, and infighting among federal health officials. Conservative critics of the index have described it as a form of price fixing. In a news briefing after the signing ceremony, Alex M. Azar II, the health secretary, said the executive orders signaled that arguments in the administration about how to proceed were now over. He declined to describe a regulatory plan for enacting the orders.
