President Donald Trump revealed what he called two groundbreaking rules to dramatically lower prices of prescription drugs for the American people.
The first rule implemented will prevent pharmacy benefit management companies, or middlemen, from ripping off Medicare patients with high prescription prices, Trump said. He added that these middlemen stop large discounts from reaching patients.
“Today’s action ends this injustice and requires that these discounts go directly to people,” the president said. “These are the people that need it.”
The second action will change how the U.S. government pays for drugs in the global market.
Before, Americans often paid more than twice as much for the exact same drug as other medically developed countries.
“In case after case, our citizens pay massively higher prices and other nations for the same exact pill from the same factory, effectively subsidizing socialism abroad with sky rocketing prices at home,” Trump said.
To solve this problem, the Trump administration is in the works of finalizing the Most Favored Nation Rule. The rule will put Medicare into the lowest rung of prices other nations pay for their drugs.
Trump said that “big pharma” has been abusing Americans for generations.
“Big Pharma ran millions of dollars of negative ads against me during the campaign, which I won by the way, but you know, we’ll find that out. Almost 74 million votes. We had big pharma against us, we had the media against us, we had big tech against us, we had a lot of dishonesty against us.”
In a few weeks, the administration will also finalize rules requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and EpiPens directly to patients.
