President Trump on Friday unveiled his long-awaited plan for lowering drug prices after promising for more than a year to take dramatic action to…
President Trump on Friday unveiled his long-awaited plan for lowering drug prices after promising for more than a year to take dramatic action to bring down the rising costs of prescription drugs.
But the president’s plan does not include his campaign promise campaign pledge to use the massive buying power of the federal government’s Medicare program to directly negotiate lower drug prices for seniors — a pledge that freaked out Big Pharma because it could hurt their bottom lines.
Instead, Trump cobbled together some old and new ideas to increase competition and improve transparency in the highly complex drug pricing system with the ultimate aim of wringing more savings for consumers.
“We will have tougher negotiation, more competition and much lower prices at the pharmacy counter, and it will start to take effect very soon,” Trump predicted from the Rose Garden at the White House.
The president slammed pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists as well as Obamacare and foreign countries for the rising prices of prescription drugs as he outlined his reforms.
“Our plan will end the dishonest double dealing that allows the middle man to pocket rebates and discounts that should be passed on to consumers and patients,” Trump said, referring to distributors who buy drugs from directly from manufacturers and then mark them up dramatically before selling them to pharmacies.
“Our plan bans the pharmacist gag rule, which punishes pharmacists for telling patients how to save money. This is a total rip off and we are ending it.”
He also said that the Food and Drug Administration would speed up the approval process for cheaper over-the-counter medicines so that patients can get more medicines without having to pay for prescription drugs.
“Finally, as we demand fairness for American patients at home we will also demand fairness overseas. When foreign governments extort unreasonably low prices from US drug makers, Americans have to pay more to subsidize the enormous cost of research and development,” he said.
“In some cases medicine that costs a few dollars in a foreign country costs hundreds of dollars in America for the same pill with the same ingredients, in the same package made in the same plant, and that is unacceptable.”
Trump’s approach that avoids a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but it could also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs.
“Consumers are ultimately going to be the judge of this announcement,” said Dan Mendelson, a health care consultant. “If they don’t address the cost that patients see at the pharmacy counter it’s not going to be seen as responsive.”
A majority of Americans say passing laws to bring down prescription drug prices should a “top priority” for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
As a candidate, Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry, accusing companies of “getting away with murder.”
But as president he has shied away from major reforms and staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry, including health secretary, Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly.
Azar and other Trump officials have described the problem in stark terms and promised bold action.
“Every incentive is toward higher list prices because everyone in the system gets a cut off that list price except the patient,” Azar told “Fox and Friends” Friday morning.
One new proposal would allow senior citizens enrolled in Medicare who hit the catastrophic period to pay nothing out of pocket, “so really relieve a huge burden on our senior citizens,” Azar said.
Other parts of the plan were previously released in the president’s budget proposal and would require action by Congress.
Those include requiring insurers to share rebates from drug companies with Medicare patients and changing the way Medicare pays for high-priced drugs administered at doctors’ offices.
Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years as Americans face pricing pressure from all sides: New medicines for life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year.
And older drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually.
Meanwhile, Americans are paying more at the pharmacy counter due to health insurance plans that require them to shoulder more of their
prescription costs.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb — another Trump official with industry ties — said earlier that lack of transparency created a perverse system of incentives in which drugmakers and other health care companies benefit from rising prices.
“Right now, we don’t have a truly free market when it comes to drug pricing, and in too many cases, that’s driving prices to unaffordable levels for some patients,” Gottlieb said in a speech last week.
Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the US government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other countries.
Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the nation, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers. Democrats have long favored giving Medicare that power, but Republicans traditionally oppose the idea.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices is unacceptable to the powerful drug lobby, which has spent tens of millions of dollars since Trump’s inauguration to influence the Washington conversation around drug prices, including a high-profile TV advertising campaign portraying its scientists as medical trailblazers.
With AP
