President Trump on Friday announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices, the latest step in his bid to try to align U.S. costs with the lower drug prices in European countries.
Mr. Trump has now reached deals with 14 of the 17 drugmakers to which he sent letters in July demanding that they lower prices. The nine companies participating in Friday’s announcement are Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Roche’s Genentech unit, Gilead, GSK, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi.
Drugmakers have been eager to strike voluntary deals with the administration in hopes of avoiding punitive regulatory action that could cut deeply into their profits. Over the last few months, Mr. Trump has announced similar agreements with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, EMD Serono, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
The three major drugmakers that have yet to announce deals with the administration are AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson and Regeneron. Alexandra Bowie, a spokeswoman for Regeneron, said her company was still in talks with the administration.
Under the arrangements, the manufacturers will offer some of their drugs through websites where Americans can bypass insurance and use their own money to buy the products.
To help patients navigate that process, the Trump administration plans to create a site called TrumpRx.gov, which will direct patients to the manufacturers’ direct-buy websites. Officials put up a promotional version of the TrumpRx website this fall and said they plan for it to be operational in January.
The drugmakers also agreed to sell most of their products to state Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for low-income Americans, at the prices they offer to other wealthy countries.
Medicaid is already legally required to get the lowest drug prices in the United States, which are often comparable to those in European countries. But administration officials said the deals would bring significant savings for some drugs.
The drugmakers also said they would introduce new medicines in the United States at prices comparable to what they ask other wealthy countries to pay.
In exchange, the companies secured three-year exemptions from any tariffs that Mr. Trump might impose on imported pharmaceuticals, administration officials said. Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to impose punishing tariffs on imported medicines but has not followed through.
In the United States, prices for brand-name drugs are three times as high, on average, as those in peer nations. Mr. Trump has long complained that the United States is unfairly subsidizing lower prices in European countries, a view echoed by many pharmaceutical executives.
The deals announced on Friday do not address the high costs of most drugs already on the market covered under private insurance or other government health insurance programs like Medicare. Those costs are borne by U.S. employers and consumers who pay in the form of taxes, health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.
The agreements also stop short of regulation that would force drugmakers to lower their prices, an approach Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully in his first term.
This year, the Trump administration has gone through the administrative process of developing and reviewing proposals for drug pricing regulation, a threat that has helped bring drugmakers to the negotiating table.
According to notices on a government website, reviews were completed this week for proposed rules titled “guarding U.S. Medicare against rising drug costs” and a “global benchmark for efficient drug pricing.” But no announcements have emerged from the process.
Rebecca Robbins is a Times reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
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