The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board continued with its needling of Donald Trump on Wednesday, this time explaining in a scathing article why it believes the president’s planned expansion of drug price controls should be a no-go.
It’s Trump’s “worst idea since tariffs,” the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper warned with its headline. Trump’s market-spooking trade policies have been relentlessly attacked by the paper, leading to his bristling comments to one of its reporters this weekend.
“President Trump and Republicans appear to be shrinking from reforming Medicaid, but that’s not the worst of it,” the Journal said of his drugs plans. “To replace the spending slowdown they won’t get in Medicaid, they may expand drug price controls. For that trade we could have elected Democrats.”
Trump officials want Medicaid to pay drug makers “the lowest price charged by other developed countries” as, the Journal suggested, “a path of less political resistance to achieve some $880 billion in Medicaid savings.”
But savings would be “negligible” and “the scheme would harm innovation and raise prices for Americans with private insurance,” the newspaper feared.