President Donald Trump took on Big Pharma Monday with an executive order that will reduce the prices for prescriptions.
The president said the U.S. “will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma,” per Fox News.
He explained how it works.
“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 said. “Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90%.”
Trump added “starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing. We’re subsidizing others’ healthcare, the countries where they paid a small fraction of what for the same drug that what we pay many, many times more for and will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.”
The U.S. has carried the burden of expensive prescriptions.
“Even though the United States is home to only 4% of the world’s population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two thirds of their profits in America. So think of that with 4% of the population, the pharmaceutical companies make most of their money. Most of their profits from America. That’s not a good thing,” Trump said.
“I think, by the way, pharmaceutical – I have great respect for these companies and for the people that run them. I really do, and I think they did one of the greatest jobs in history for their company, convincing people for many years that this was a fair system. Nobody really understood why, but I figured it out. For years, pharmaceutical and drug companies have said that research and development costs were what they are, and for no reason whatsoever, they had to be borne by America alone,” Trump said. “Not anymore, they don’t.”
The White House said the executive order “directs the U.S. Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce to take action to ensure foreign countries are not engaged in practices that purposefully and unfairly undercut market prices and drive price hikes in the United States.”
“The Order instructs the Administration to communicate price targets to pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish that America, the largest purchaser and funder of prescription drugs in the world, gets the best deal,” the White House said.
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services will establish a mechanism through which American patients can buy their drugs directly from manufacturers who sell to Americans at a ‘Most-Favored-Nation’ price, bypassing middlemen,” the White House added. “If drug manufacturers fail to offer most-favored-nation pricing, the Order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services 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.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke of the unlikelihood of this ever happening.
“I never thought that this would happen in my lifetime,” Kennedy said.
“I have a couple of kids who are Democrats, are big Bernie Sanders fans. And when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes. Because they thought, this is never going to happen,” he said. “And we finally have a president who is willing to stand up for the American people.”
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