The president is pushing for lowering drug prices, which has long been a source of economic burden for American patients.
US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that will reduce the prices of prescription drugs in the United States by up to 90%.
In an announcement Monday, Trump said drug companies that have made “profits” must lower prices, but must be held responsible primarily due to high prices in foreign countries.
“We’re going to be equal,” Trump said at a press conference. “We all make the same payments. We’re going to pay what Europe pays.”
People in the United States have long been an outlier when it comes to the prices they pay for many types of life-saving drugs, and can pay several times more than their peers in other rich countries.
The phenomenon is often attributed to the substantial economic and political impacts that the pharmaceutical industry exercises in the United States.
The high costs of medical drugs have been a popular source of dissatisfaction in the United States for years, with Trump accusing the pharmaceutical industry in 2017 of “escaped murder.”
However, in his remarks Monday, the US leader also appeared to say that US drug companies were not ultimately condemning differences in price. Instead, Trump framed these high prices under familiar terms of trade imbalances with partners such as the European Union, saying the US is “subsidizing” lower drug prices in other countries.
That perspective appears to coincide with the framing of the pharmaceutical industry itself. The industry’s most powerful lobbying sector says that the high prices for US consumers are “foreign countries are not paying fair shares.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a leftist politician who has been opposed to the high prices paid by US patients for years, said Trump’s orders were not US companies but miscribing foreign countries for their prices.
“I agree with President Trump, that’s the rage that Americans will pay the highest price in the world for prescription drugs,” Sanders said in a statement.
“But let’s be clear. The problem isn’t that prescription drug prices are too low in Europe and Canada. The problem is that the extremely greedy pharmaceutical industry, which has earned more than $100 million in profits last year by tearing Americans apart last year.”
A fact sheet shared by the White House said the administration would “convey price targets to drug manufacturers to establish that the world’s largest buyer and the world’s largest prescription drug funders will make the best deal.”
After the announcement, stock prices of US drugmakers were slashed upwards. Experts have questioned Trump’s optimistic claim that drug prices will fall quickly and effectively.
“It appears they’re planning on asking them to voluntarily lower prices to places where the plan is really unknown,” said Rachel Sachs, a health law expert at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
“If they do not lower prices to the desired location, the HHS (Ministry of Health and Human Services) will take other actions on a very long timeline.