President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to force “Big Pharma” to reduce the cost of drugs and pharmaceuticals in the United States by using the “most favored nations drug pricing.”
“The principle is simple – whatever the lowest price paid for a drug in other developed countries, that is the price that Americans will pay,” Trump announced on Monday. “Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90%. Big Pharma will either abide by this principle voluntarily, or we’ll use the power of the federal government to ensure that we are paying the same price as other countries.”
“Starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing,” Trump added. “We’re subsidizing others’ healthcare in countries where they paid a small fraction of what — for the same drug that we pay many, many times more for, and will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.”
According to The Post Millennial, the 47th president explained on Monday that Americans currently pay 70% more for prescription drugs than they did in 2000 and that the United States “has the highest drug prices anywhere in the world by sometimes a factor of five, six, seven, eight times.”
Trump added, “Even though the United States is home to only four percent of the world’s population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two-thirds of their profits in America.”
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The president told reporters on Monday that prescription drug prices across the world will “equalize” following his “most-favored nation” executive order, according to The Post Millennial.
“We are going to pay the lowest price there is in the world,” Trump said. “Whoever is paying the lowest price -that’s the price that we’re going to get.”
In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order on Monday, the White House explained that the administration is directing the U.S. Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to “ensure foreign countries are not engaged in practices that purposefully and unfairly undercut market prices and drive price hikes in the United States.”
According to the White House, the Trump administration will present “price targets” to the manufacturers of pharmaceutical drugs to ensure that the United States “gets the best deal.” Additionally, the executive order directs Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to develop a way for Americans to bypass “middlemen” and purchase drugs directly from manufacturers who sell pharmaceuticals at “Most-Favored-Nation” pricing.
If pharmaceutical companies do not provide American patients with “Most-Favored-Nation” pricing, Kennedy will be directed to “(1) propose rules that impose most-favored-nation pricing; and (2) take other aggressive measures to significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs to the American consumer and end anticompetitive practices.”
