President Donald Trump on Thursday sent letters to 17 pharmaceutical companies regarding reducing drug prices.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at her press briefing that Trump sent out the letters following an executive order earlier this year.
“The president signed an executive order earlier this year to solve the problem of exorbitant pharmaceutical pricing,” Leavitt said. “According to recent data, the prices that Americans have been paying for brand name drugs are more than three times the price other similar, similarly developed nations pay. The president is determined to solve this problem and took further action today. He has signed 17 letters to pharmaceutical companies’ CEOs.”
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Leavitt then read aloud a letter sent to the CEO of Eli Lilly, then said all of the letters would be made available to the press following the briefing.
Trump also began posting copies of each letter to his social media platform, TRUTH Social.
In his letter to Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks, Trump noted that he signed an executive order on May 12 titled “Delivering Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing to American Patients.” The order is intended to “stop global freeloading and guarantee that Americans pay the same prices enjoyed by other developed nations.”
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“Right now, brand name drugs in the United States are up to three times higher on average than anywhere else for the identical medicines,” Trump wrote. “This unacceptable burden on hardworking American families ends with my administration. Most proposals the Trump administration has received to resolve this critical issue promised more of the same shifting blame and requesting policy changes that would result in billions of dollars in handouts to industry.”
Moving forward, Trump warned, the only thing he 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.”
He called on Eli Lilly and Company and “every manufacturer doing business in our great country” to take action within 60 days. Trump said they must “extend the most favored nation pricing to Medicaid, guarantee most-favored-nation pricing for newly launched drugs, return increased revenues abroad to American patients and taxpayers, and provide for direct purchasing at most favored nation pricing.”
Trump said his team, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz, stands ready to implement the terms. The president said he expects Ricks to further engage with Kennedy and Oz “immediately in good faith to deliver relief for American families.”
“Make no mistake, a collaborative effort towards achieving global pricing parity would be the most effective path for companies, the government and American patients,” Trump wrote. “But if you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abuse of drug pricing practices. Americans are demanding lower drug prices, and they need them today. Other nations have been freeloading on U.S. innovation for far too long, and it is time they pay their fair share.”
Trump said he expects binding commitments to each of his listed goals by Sept. 29, deeming the calls to action a “vital national priority.”
Sixteen other companies received similar letters from Trump. They were: AbbVie, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis, Gilead Sciences, Inc., EMD Serono, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, Amgen, Genentech, Johnson & Johnson, GSK, Merck, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Sanofi. Several of the letters showed the CEO’s last names crossed out and written in their place, their first names, suggesting a personal touch to the president’s demands to the Big Pharma heads.
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