President Donald Trump and the largest drug manufacturers have reached an agreement to lower Medicaid prescription drug costs.
The companies are Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi.
I’m thrilled to be joined by the leaders of nine of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, all very big names, celebrities in their own right, very, very powerful people, and they had some of the most admired companies anywhere in the world.It’s a great group to announce that they’ve agreed to offer many of their flagship drugs, really all of their flagship drugs, at heavily discounted Most Favored Nations prices.In other words, whatever the drug sells for over the world. In the world, whatever the lowest number is, if it’s Germany, we will match that price right now, sometimes it’s 10 times higher. We’ve been laughed at and scoffed at for years, for years. In fact, I was going to do it in my first term, but unfortunately, with the advent of COVID, as you would say, it was not, I don’t think it was a very good time to be hitting up Spain, Italy, France, but now we’re doing it. So the hardest thing to do is going to be to get a country to do it, because we would have a bill in New York that was for sale for $130 and you could buy it in Germany and France and Spain and someplace.Anyways, they set their own prices for $10 so we’d pay 10 or 13 times more. Pay five times more, pay all different prices. Now, whatever the lowest price is, now, the pharmaceutical companies were difficult, but they also love our country. They knew it was unfair, but in the end they were great. I appreciate it.
The fact sheet from the White House said that all of the agreements “will provide every State Medicaid program in the country access to MFN (Most Favored Nations) drug prices on products made.”
Trump has now reached deals with 14 companies to lower drug prices.
Last month, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk agreed to lower the prices of weight-loss drugs.
Trump listed a few price reductions:
As an example of the price reductions we have secured through these new agreements, Santa Fe will cut the cost of its blood thinner Plavix from $750 to less than $16. Wow. Where’s Santa Fe? Where are you? What? That’s incredible. Huh, could have gone to $17. That’s amazing. And you’re going to do tremendous business. You’re going to do much more business.So that’s coming from $750 think of that. $750 and that’s the number one blood thinner. I don’t want to know about that. I take an aspirin to less than $16, think of that.Bristol Myers Squibb, a great company, both great companies, will cut the price of HIV medication from nearly $1,500 to $217 and it will cut the cost of Hepatitis B medication Bariclude from $1,400 to $413.Gilead will cut the Hepatitis C medication, EP Lusa, from nearly $25,000 to less than $2,500 and all prices are like that because we’re bringing them down to the world’s lowest price. Everything.
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