President Trump on Friday announced a deal with the British drugmaker AstraZeneca to lower drug prices, his second pact with a major pharmaceutical company in an effort to make prescription drugs more affordable.
Under the deal, AstraZeneca agreed to sell its drugs to Medicaid, the health insurance program for lower-income Americans, at about the same prices that it offers to wealthy countries in Europe.
The agreement, along with one with Pfizer last week, is the product of a Trumpian brand of horse-trading. For months, the president has threatened to impose tariffs on imported medicines, demanding that drug companies lower prices and bring manufacturing back to the United States. Drugmakers have been eager to find ways to dodge much more aggressive action that could cut deeply into their profits.
The nation’s top health officials publicly acknowledged on Friday that Mr. Trump’s tariff threats were the leverage needed to persuade powerful drug companies to expand and build new U.S. plants as well.
“Now, I’m not sure that Pascal would like to say — but behind the scenes, he did say, tariffs were a big reason he came here,” Mr. Trump said, referring to AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, who stood beside him at Friday’s announcement in the Oval Office.
AstraZeneca and Pfizer both revealed that their new pricing arrangements with the White House guaranteed them a three-year reprieve from any tariffs the Trump administration would impose on the products they produced overseas. The Trump administration has threatened to impose tariffs of up to 15 percent on brand-name drugs from the European Union and 100 percent from other parts of the world, but it has delayed those from a deadline of Oct. 1.
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The post Trump Announces a Deal on Drug Prices With AstraZeneca appeared first on New York Times.
