The president’s great solution to equalize America’s prescription costs with countries around the globe apparently boils down to raising the cost of drugs everywhere else.
Donald Trump explained during the unveiling of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report Thursday that his administration had had intense discussions with the country’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, allegedly cornering them into lowering the cost of drugs by raising them in other nations.
But further details of Trump’s plan didn’t sound like a leader that was hard on drug companies.
“The companies are all coming in, we’ve had some very promising interactions,” said former TV host and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz. “People have talked about drug prices in a silo in isolation, but when you start going to the countries where they give discounts to because they’re getting beat up there and you support these companies, they see a huge upside potential. Even greater than the numbers you mentioned.
“They should be able to charge more than what they would have historically been tolerant of, if they have the support of the U.S. government and you,” he continued, mentioning that Kennedy was aware of the conversations with drug companies.
“Well, they were artificially low and artificially high. We were artificially high, they were artificially low,” Trump responded, emphasizing that the government would be acting expediently to enact the international price changes.
It’s not the first time that Trump has lied that America subsidizes the health care of other countries, and that low drug prices outside the U.S. are because the American government has financially offset would-be high prices in other countries.
But that’s detached from reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, developed countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage—not because the U.S. government “subsidizes” drug costs in other developed nations.
Other things that researchers point to as potential solutions for high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to restrict out-of-pocket, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (like those in Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform. It’s unclear how the Trump administration would work to undo the policies and regulations in foreign countries that keep their drug prices low.
Beyond that, America’s lax drug pricing has historically been thanks to Trump’s party.
In a post on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump pledged that his executive order focused on hacking prescription drug prices would save the government trillions of dollars. He also falsely claimed that Democrats had stood in the way of this kind of pharmaceutical reform, ignoring the fact that health care and pharmacy drug reform has been a pillar of the progressive platform in recent years (see: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Medicare for All” 2021 revival, which would have created a single-payer system in this country).
“Campaign Contributions can do wonders, but not with me, and not with the Republican Party. We are going to do the right thing, something that the Democrats have fought for many years,” Trump wrote at the time.
But in 2006, Republicans were the ones who adamantly stood in the way of federal drug price negotiations, ripping the teeth out of a bill that would have mandated drug companies to negotiate lower drug prices with Medicare officials.
“Instead of actually tackling the issues that concern average American families, the Republicans have passed legislation to help their wealthy friends and the huge corporations that support their campaigns,” said former North Carolina Representative G.K. Butterfield at the time before the measure passed.
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