As much as Donald Trump talked about lowering the costs of prescription medications in his first term, the president’s underwhelming efforts fell short, and drug costs continued to climb. The Republican’s second term, however, was supposed to be different.
In fact, just a couple of months ago Trump appeared on Fox News to claim he’d been “studying” the pharmaceutical industry, and he declared, “I figured it out.” Around the same time, the president signed an executive order ostensibly about lowering drug costs, although the directive didn’t do much.
The good news is that Trump still appears to be focused on the issue. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, he even talked about lowering prices by up to 1,500%, which was literally and mathematically impossible. The bad news is that the president still doesn’t have an effective plan. NBC News reported on new letters the White House has sent to more than a dozen major pharmaceutical companies, demanding that they lower consumer prices within 60 days.
In the letters — which Trump published on his social media platform Truth Social — the drugmakers were told to offer the ‘full portfolio’ of their existing medications to Medicaid patients at the same prices paid abroad, also known as the ‘most favored nation’ rule. He also told drugmakers to ‘guarantee’ that patients on Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance get the same lower prices that are paid abroad for all newly approved drugs ‘both upon launch and moving forward.’
While it’s likely the companies and their legal teams read the presidential correspondence with great interest, consumers shouldn’t get their hopes up. As The New York Times explained, “Despite the strong language in the letters … Mr. Trump’s demands amount to a request that drug companies act voluntarily: His administration has not put forward a clear legal authority to compel them to lower their prices.”
As regular readers might recall, Trump actually broke with Republican Party orthodoxy in 2016 on lowering prices on prescription drugs. In fact, he complained bitterly before reaching the White House about the pharmaceutical industry’s powerful lobbyists and said drug companies were “getting away with murder.”
In his first term, the president even accused the drug industry of corruption, arguing that pharmaceutical companies contributed “massive amounts of money” to politicians as part of a scheme to keep the cost of medicines higher.
That posture didn’t last. Trump ultimately put a pharmaceutical company executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and just as importantly, he tapped a top lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company to serve as one of the key architects of his first-term drug pricing plan.
With this in mind, around this time seven years ago, Trump unveiled a policy he seemed quite excited about, boasting to Americans that “in two weeks” (it’s always “two weeks”) the public would see “massive drops in prices” thanks entirely to a presidential directive he’d signed.
There were no massive price drops. The Republican’s entire policy proved to be a bust that was rejected in the courts, and his bold promises went unfulfilled.
It fell to Joe Biden to make progress on an issue where Trump had failed.
Years later, the incumbent president nevertheless returned to the issue with unnerving hype, and he declared on his social media platform in May, “DRUG PRICES TO BE CUT BY 59%, PLUS!” No such cut followed. Complicating matters, when it comes to his administration’s and his party’s approach to the issue, Trump continues to conveniently overlook some relevant details. The New York Times reported about a month ago: The sweeping Republican policy bill that awaits President Trump’s signature on Friday includes a little-noticed victory for the drug industry. The legislation allows more medications to be exempt from Medicare’s price negotiation program, which was created to lower the government’s drug spending. Now, manufacturers will be able to keep those prices higher. The Times cited an estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that found the Republican-imposed change will save the industry — the one the president claims to have “studied” — nearly $5 billion over the next decade. Consumers aren’t catching a break, but the drug industry appears to be benefiting quite a bit from Trump’s and his party’s efforts. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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