President Trump posted on social media letters he sent to 17 major pharmaceutical companies asking them to take specific actions to cut U.S. drug prices within the next 60 days. The White House issued a fact sheet on the President’s effort here. Among the President’s specific demands to the drugmakers are: (1) to provide their full portfolio of existing medicines at the lowest price offered in other developed nations—or what he calls the most-favored-nation price—to every single Medicaid patient; (2) to contract with the U.S. to guarantee that Medicare, Medicaid and commercial payers receive most-favored-nation prices on all new drugs upon launch and moving forward; (3) to negotiate harder with what he called “foreign freeloading nations”; and (4) to adopt models that sell their medicines directly to consumers or businesses, which effectively eliminates middlemen, like pharmacy benefit managers.
In the letters, Trump threatened to “deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices” if companies refuse to comply. He asked each company to commit to agree to his demands by September 29th. The 17 drugmakers who received the letters are: AbbVie, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Regeneron, and Sanofi.