{"id":328921,"date":"2025-10-24T10:44:30","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/328921\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T10:44:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T10:44:30","slug":"trumps-approach-to-lowering-drug-costs-is-raising-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/328921\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s approach to lowering drug costs is raising questions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration is turning to\u00a0an unconventional approach to lowering drug prices in the United States: striking deals directly with Big Pharma companies in an attempt to bring U.S. prices in line with what other countries pay.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump and the nation\u2019s health care officials have touted these \u201cmost-favored nation\u201d deals as the most effective means to getting pharmaceutical prices down, beyond even the power of the Medicare drug price negotiations already in place.<\/p>\n

The key issue, health experts say, is that the\u00a0public has had little visibility into these deals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hard part, of course, is we don\u2019t know exactly what\u2019s in there,\u201d said\u00a0Spencer Perlman, managing partner and director of health research at the consultancy Veda Partners. The administration has held news conferences and put out fact sheets with bullet points, but experts have yet to review the fine print.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s unclear how deep these actions will go, given that there are more than 2,500 pharmaceutical companies operating in the United States.<\/p>\n

The first deal came early this month with\u00a0Pfizer, which President Donald Trump said\u00a0has\u00a0agreed to lower U.S. drug prices and onshore a greater share of drug manufacturing in exchange for relief from certain tariffs. As part of the deal, the company agreed to make drugs available on the administration\u2019s new \u201cTrumpRx\u201d direct-to-consumer medicine website and offer most-favored-nation pricing within Medicaid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ten days later, the administration struck a similar deal with AstraZeneca. And last week, the administration announced a deal with EMD Serono to lower the price of a widely used fertility drug, in exchange for tariff relief and expedited FDA review of another drug.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to the White House, the Pfizer\u00a0and AstraZeneca deals\u00a0focus on lowering drug prices in Medicaid<\/a>, which experts say likely isn\u2019t a big lift for companies because the Medicaid price and the most-favored-nation price may be similar. If the goal is to lower costs for consumers, Medicaid copays are already considered low.<\/p>\n

As for onshore\u00a0manufacturing, companies may have already had plans to break\u00a0ground on new domestic facilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are things they probably would have done anyway, or at least contemplated anyway,\u201d\u00a0Perlman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Several drug pricing experts and industry watchers said that without key details on negotiations and the multiple facets of the U.S. health care system, it\u2019s hard to call the individual pharma deals a win.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rachel Sachs, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis who was a senior adviser in the Office of General Counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2023 to 2024, said the public doesn\u2019t know how enforceable these agreements are.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s reasonable to ask the question whether confidential agreements are a good way to make public policy,\u201d Sachs said.<\/p>\n

She noted that stock prices for the companies\u00a0spiked after\u00a0announcements of the deals, \u201cwhich is not typically thought to be a sign that prices will be markedly lower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Best method<\/p>\n

Drug pricing has long been a target for Congress. The ability for Medicare to negotiate the price for several major drugs was included in Democrats\u2019 2022 reconciliation law.<\/p>\n

Perlman said that if the administration is able to secure the most-favored-nation\u00a0pricing for all parts of the U.S. market, it could result in savings for consumers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take it at face value, sure \u2026 that\u2019s potentially better\u201d than the Medicare price negotiations, Perlman said. But he said the lack of details makes that determination difficult, especially when it\u2019s not clear that the drug companies are agreeing to most-favored-nation pricing across the board.<\/p>\n

Brian Reid, who helms the health consultancy Reid Strategic,\u00a0said his biggest question is how\u00a0such MFN pricing would apply to Medicaid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMedicaid is not a huge channel, but it\u2019s meaningful,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s important to states. And understanding the extent to which, what is MFN in those markets? How might that roll out?\u201d<\/p>\n

Sachs noted that the administration is using a \u201ccarrot and stick\u201d approach, with the\u00a0threat of tariffs and incentives like expedited review of drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

EMD Serono, which entered a deal with the administration for its fertility treatments, received one of the FDA\u2019s inaugural National Priority Review vouchers for its infertility drug Pergoveris, which is already available in European markets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary earlier this year announced\u00a0the new\u00a0priority review<\/a>\u00a0voucher program, which awards vouchers for expedited review timelines for products it views as addressing a wide range of health priorities, including \u201caddressing a large unmet medical need\u201d and \u201cdelivering more innovative cures for the American people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n

The same dynamic could be playing out for obesity drugs.<\/p>\n

The list of 2027 Medicare price negotiations includes popular GLP-1 medications\u00a0used to treat obesity and diabetes. But CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz hinted earlier this month that the agency had something in the works on such drugs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in the middle of a lot of action in that space, but you\u2019ll be hearing more about it very soon,\u201d Oz told CNBC\u2019s Bertha Coombs at the Aspen Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In response to a question from Endpoints News last week, Trump claimed that the price of obesity medications would go \u201cmuch lower\u201d than $150. Oz quickly jumped in and clarified that officials\u00a0\u201chave not negotiated those yet.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to be rolling these out over time,\u201d Oz said. \u201cThe president will be happy with those results, and until he is, we\u2019re not going to close those negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reid pointed out that the negotiations for obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy for 2027 are nearly complete, with the Nov. 1 deadline approaching for the companies and the administration to finalize\u00a0the Medicare price.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven that\u2019s confusing, because some of these drugs, the weight loss drugs, have been negotiated,\u201d he said. \u201cJust in some other part of the government.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sachs said a most-favored-nation deal appears to be in the works, but\u00a0it\u2019s possible that the administration could pilot some other kind of program.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post in August reported that the Trump administration is planning an experiment through the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation that would give Medicaid and Medicare Part D plans the option to cover GLP-1s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This report was corrected to accurately reflect the years Rachel Sachs served in the Office of General Counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is turning to\u00a0an unconventional approach to lowering drug prices in the United States: striking deals…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":328922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[46367,22608,8015,163547,36730,327,36731,77,69,163548,25982,151,6434,210,30923,1141,1142,17819,86565,3170,3235,1571,44350,153,2437,277,67,132,68,2058,5223],"class_list":{"0":"post-328921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-46367","9":"tag-agency","10":"tag-american","11":"tag-brand-safety","12":"tag-centers-for-medicare-and-medicaid-services","13":"tag-congress","14":"tag-department-of-health-and-human-services","15":"tag-donald-j-trump","16":"tag-donald-trump","17":"tag-drug-companies","18":"tag-executive-branch","19":"tag-fda","20":"tag-food-and-drug-administration","21":"tag-health","22":"tag-health-and-human-services","23":"tag-health-care","24":"tag-healthcare","25":"tag-house","26":"tag-human-services","27":"tag-medicaid","28":"tag-medicare","29":"tag-national","30":"tag-pharma","31":"tag-policy","32":"tag-stock-market","33":"tag-trump","34":"tag-united-states","35":"tag-unitedstates","36":"tag-us","37":"tag-washington","38":"tag-white-house"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115428738269221844","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}