President Donald Trump sent letters to drug company CEOs demanding that they lower prices.
The letters, which Trump posted to social media, say name-brand drug prices “are up to three times higher on average than anywhere else for identical medicines.”
“This unacceptable burden on hardworking American families ends with my Administration,” Trump said.
The letters were sent to 17 companies and are identical. They give companies 60 days to lower drug prices through most-favored-nation (MFN) pricing as explained in an executive order titled “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.”
The executive order, signed in May, orders companies to sell drugs in the United States for the same price charged in foreign countries, The Daily Wire previously reported. The order says companies charge Americans more for drugs because “drug manufacturers deeply discount their products to access foreign markets, and subsidize that decrease through enormously high prices in the United States.”
Both the order and the letters direct companies to charge MFN prices in America.
Some of the companies that received letters include AbbVie, Eli Lilly and Company, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, and Pfizer.
The letters tell companies to provide their “full portfolios” of drugs at MFN prices for Medicaid patients, guarantee MFN prices for new drugs, negotiate with “freeloading” nations to “return increased revenues” to American patients, and allow direct purchasing of drugs at MFN prices.
“Moving forward, the only thing I will accept from drug manufacturers is a commitment that provides American families immediate relief from the vastly inflated drug prices and an end to the free ride of American innovation by European and other developed nations,” Trump said in the letters.
Companies have until September 29 to implement Trump’s terms.
In May, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said other nations should chip in for research and development. He said raising prices in other nations by 20% would drastically reduce costs in the U.S.
Trump signed another executive order earlier in May to reduce the regulatory burden on the domestic production of critical medicines.
“[If] you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices,” Trump said.
The other companies that received letters were Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Sanofi.