President Trump outlined on Friday his long-awaited plan for lowering prescription-drug prices after promising for more than a year to take dramatic action to reduce the skyrocketing costs.
But the president’s plan did not include his oft-repeated campaign promise to use the massive buying power of
the Medicare program to directly negotiate lower drug prices for seniors.
Instead Trump cobbled together old and new ideas to increase competition and improve transparency in the highly complex drug-pricing system with the goal of saving consumers money.
“We will have tougher negotiation, more competition and much lower prices at the pharmacy counter, and it will start to take effect very soon,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden.
He slammed pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists — who donate millions of dollars to presidential and congressional campaigns — as well as ObamaCare and foreign countries for the rising prices of prescription drugs as he outlined his reforms.
“Our plan will end the dishonest double-dealing that allows the middleman to pocket rebates and discounts that should be passed on to consumers and patients,” Trump said, referring to pharmacy-benefit managers that negotiate drug discounts for insurers and employers.
The intermediaries pocket a cut of the rebates that are common in the industry. Last year, rebates and discounts totaled $153 billion.
“Our plan bans the pharmacist gag rule, which punishes pharmacists for telling patients how to save money. This is a total rip-off, and we are ending it,” Trump said.
Trump said the Food and Drug Administration would speed up the approval process for cheaper over-the-counter medicines.
“Finally, as we demand fairness for American patients at home, we will also demand fairness overseas. When foreign governments extort unreasonably low prices from US drugmakers, Americans have to pay more to subsidize the enormous cost of research and development,” he said.
Trump noted that the same medicine manufactured in the US can be bought for a fraction of the cost in many other countries.
His approach avoids a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but it could disappoint Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs, experts said.
The advocacy group Health Care for America Now slammed the speech as “all talk, no action on drug prices.”
A majority of Americans say passing laws to lower prescription-drug prices should a “top priority” for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
As a candidate, Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry, accusing companies of “getting away with murder.”
One new proposal would allow senior citizens enrolled in Medicare who hit the catastrophic period — which kicks in after they have paid more than $5,000 — to pay nothing more out of pocket.
Other parts of the plan were previously released in the president’s budget proposal and would require action by Congress.
Those include requiring insurers to share rebates from drug companies with Medicare patients and changing the way Medicare pays for high-priced drugs administered at doctors’ offices.
The US spent $1,162 per person on prescription drugs in 2015, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
That’s more than twice the $497 per person spent in the UK, which has a nationalized health care system.
With AP