The Trump administration has put in motion its plan to secure lower prescription drug costs for Americans.
This week, the Trump administration took its first steps to implement what’s called “most-favored-nation” pricing. Under the plan, drug prices would fall to the lowest price paid by nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes most nations with strong economies, according to Reuters.
“You can have, within a period of weeks, you can have drug costs that drop like a rock,” President Donald Trump said Thursday, according to The Hill.
Trump said that Americans have borne an unfair burden of high prescription prices.
“We are going to now get a reduction in drug costs of up to 89 percent in some cases, but 50 percent would be a low, a bad number,” Trump said.
“It’s going to be massive numbers. It’s going to be incredible for Medicaid, incredible for all forms of health care. Medicare is going to be — it’s going to have a huge impact, so big that nobody can calculate it.”
Trump has tasked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kenedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz with making the plan work, and on Thursday gave then a Trump-style speech.
“OK, so you as a group, I have great confidence. And if you don’t do it, I am firing every single one. Good luck, guys,” he said.
In a news release, Kennedy voiced confidence that the plan will help Americans.
“For too long, Americans have been forced to pay exorbitant prices for the same drugs that are sold overseas for far less,” he said. “That ends today. We expect pharmaceutical manufacturers to fulfill their commitment to lower prices for American patients, or we will take action to ensure they do.”
Earlier this month, Trump issued an executive order lower prescription prices.
“In case after case, our citizens pay massively higher prices than other nations pay for the same exact pill, from the same factory, effectively subsidizing socialism abroad with skyrocketing prices at home,” Trump said in a fact sheet posted on the White House website.
“So we would spend tremendous amounts of money in order to provide inexpensive drugs to another country. And when I say the price is different, you can see some examples where the price is beyond anything — four times, five times different.”
According to the order posted on the White House website, the Trump administration will develop “most-favored-nation price targets … to bring prices for American patients in line with comparably developed nations.”
The order said, it ends “global freeloading” and warns drug companies that “should drug manufacturers fail to offer American consumers the most-favored-nation lowest price, my Administration will take additional aggressive action.”
“The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and yet funds around three quarters of global pharmaceutical profits. This egregious imbalance is orchestrated through a purposeful scheme in which drug manufacturers deeply discount their products to access foreign markets and subsidize that decrease through enormously high prices in the United States,” Trump wrote in the order.
“This abuse of Americans’ generosity, who deserve low-cost pharmaceuticals on the same terms as other developed nations, must end. Americans will no longer be forced to pay almost three times more for the exact same medicines, often made in the exact same factories.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
Read the full article here