“From Qatar to QVAR, we cover it all!” says host Peter Schweizer on the most recent episode of The Drill Down.
In a move that has been widely applauded, President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order giving drug-makers 30 days to voluntarily lower prescription drug prices in the U.S. The threat contained in the order is they will face new limits later over how much the government (through Medicare and Medicaid purchasing) will pay, with the federal health department under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assigned to negotiate better pricing for prescription drugs, or else to develop a new rule that ties the price the U.S. pays for medications to lower prices paid by other countries.
Announcing the order, Trump said, “We’re going to equalize… We’re going to pay what Europe pays.”
Schweizer says this is a classic example of Trump working on behalf of ordinary Americans, who routinely pay much higher prices than people in countries with socialized healthcare systems. Schweizer cited the example of QVAR, an asthma inhaler made by Teva that costs $289 in the United States but just $9 in Germany.
But then there is the other story, of Trump announcing plans to accept as a gift a lavishly appointed Boeing 747 jumbo jet owned previously by the Qatari royal family to serve as Air Force One once it is retrofitted. Objections to this from both the Left and the Right have savaged the idea as an “emolument” expressly forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.
If the prescription drug executive order shows that Trump is focused on the needs of the American people, “the plane [story] suggests the opposite — that he is susceptible to foreign interests,” Schweizer says.
So, what is going on here?
Trump’s prescription drug order is a smart approach, Schweizer says, because it doesn’t try to fix prices in the way that price caps do, which yields scarcity. Instead, he is in effect telling pharmaceutical companies to stop undercharging the rest of the world while loading all of their efforts to recoup research and development costs onto American consumers.
He likens it to the NATO arrangement, under which the U.S. pays most of the costs of defending European countries from Russia while the Europeans are freed from having to bankroll their own defense. “Pharma companies charge us more and don’t fight with the Europeans as much to get higher prices because their profits here are so high. That needs to end,” he says.
The Biden administration counted it a great success during its term when it did something similar with 10 medications, but Trump’s executive order is far wider. Co-host Eric Eggers notes that Congress has failed to act on this problem for years because of the aggressive lobbying, political giving, and media advertising done by the big companies.
“They also spend a lot of money on media outlets. How often do you watch cable news and see those ads for all kinds of medications?” Eggers asks. “But the other part of Congress is you’ve got guys like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sen. Charles Schumer who really don’t want a private healthcare system. They want government-run healthcare. They want to kill the goose that has laid the golden egg with all of this innovation and all these great new medicines and technologies we have. So that’s why you have a standstill in Congress.”
Yet while Trump seems to be standing up for Americans over drug prices, then there is this plane business. In what the Wall Street Journal called “a political gift to Democrats,” Trump plans to accept a $400 million jet from the royal family of Qatar to use as Air Force One because Boeing has been unable to complete its contract to replace the existing ones. The White House said the scheme had been legally approved by the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. But Schweizer points out that Bondi was previously employed, very expensively, as a registered lobbyist for the government of Qatar.
“The GOP objected rightly and loudly to Hunter Biden’s influence peddling abroad while his father was in high office, followed by his selling art at inflated prices while President Biden sat in the White House,” Schweizer says. “But to compare [the plane purchase] to the Hunter Biden situation is silly. The gift is actually to the Department of Defense, not to Trump personally, although it might end up at his presidential library later.”
“But it’s still a bad idea,” he continues. “Qatar has been a state sponsor of terrorism. Hamas is actually based there. So, the source is a big problem,” Schweizer says.
Moreover, there is the security aspect of the airplane. “A Chinese company (Lenovo) sold ThinkPad laptops to the US government, and it was soon discovered that an embedded chip would have allowed them to use those computers to eavesdrop,” Schweizer noted.
Several commentators have noted the potential for espionage and have speculated that Trump is actually “trolling” the Boeing Company for being so far behind in producing the next presidential jet under a $5 billion contract that Trump re-negotiated down to $4 billion, rather than boosting the idea of using a Qatari hand-me-down.
A Boeing 747 is a massively complicated airplane. “They’re going to have to take it apart to check for bugs… I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Schweizer says.
He notes that opposition to the deal from the political left, though, comes after they said nothing about the same Qatari government giving about $6 billion to American universities, a third of that in just the past two years.
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