💊 Trump already disarmed the war on drug prices. This morning the president signed a new executive order instructing Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. to use Medicare to buy drugs at the lowest world-market prices. Big Pharma and its investors seem unconcerned, likely because RFK Jr. has already flip-flopped and declared he won’t use a far more powerful price-reducing tool: a law that says regulators can “march in” and license lower-priced versions of government-developed medicines that Big Pharma does not make “available to the public on reasonable terms.” In his first term, Trump tried to permanently block the government from ever using that law.
Under pressure from Democrats, the Biden administration explored using march-in rights, but (like Obama’s administration) backed off amid Big Pharma’s flood of lobbying and campaign cash. A 2018 study found that U.S. government funding contributed to the development of nearly all FDA-approved medicines, and yet Americans are charged the world’s highest prices for those drugs (including GLP-1 weight loss medicines).
I wanted more, so I went to the BBC article which among other things, had this to say:
Stephen J Ubl, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement that “importing foreign prices from socialist countries would be a bad deal” for American patients.
Relevant article text:
I wanted more, so I went to the BBC article which among other things, had this to say: