Trump pledges to rein in drug costs, but it may take time
WASHINGTON — Laboring to address one of his largest unfulfilled campaign promises from 2016, President Donald Trump made a new pledge Friday to rein in prescription drug prices with a series of four executive orders he signed at the White House.
The president, whose administration has struggled for 3 1/2 years to follow through on initiatives to control pharmaceutical costs, touted the moves as “bold and historic.”
But the executive orders are unlikely to deliver relief to consumers any time soon. They require new regulations that typically take months to finalize. Some may never be implemented at all.
And Trump’s announcement was dismissed by several patient advocates as more rhetoric than substance.
“While some of these proposals could help a limited number of people access insulin or EpiPens, they are pathetically small compared to the massive executive power Trump could use to make medicine affordable and available for all, if he were willing to stand up to Big Pharma,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program.
Although Trump has repeatedly pledged to take on drug prices, he hasn’t followed through and has paid a political price. Seven in 10 Americans don’t believe he is doing enough to lower medication prices, according to a November poll by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.
One of the new executive orders directs the federal government to require federally funded health clinics to give patients any discounts the clinics get for insulin and EpiPens, two drugs that have seen steep price increases in recent years.
Another order calls for the Health and Human Services Department to write new rules allowing importation of lower-cost drugs from Canada and other countries. The administration announced that proposal nearly a year ago, but hasn’t finalized it.
A third order revives another long-standing administration proposal that was never implemented to limit rebates secured by pharmacy benefit managers who negotiate prices with drugmakers on behalf of health insurers.
And the final order, which was originally proposed two years ago by Trump administration officials but never implemented, would direct Medicare to develop a program to secure some drugs at the same prices that other nations are able to negotiate, according to administration officials.
The president said that order won’t take effect for another month, a delay he said would allow drugmakers to offer their own cost containment plan. It would apply only to drugs administered by physicians though Medicare Part B, not drugs patients buy through the Part D drug plan.