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President Donald Trump plans to use his executive powers to force pharmaceutical companies to considerably reduce the cost of medicines, despite fierce opposition from industry and certain higher Republicans.
In an article on social networks on Sunday evening, Trump said that he would sign an order on Monday which would reduce prices “almost immediately from 30% to 80%”.
He added that the United States would introduce a “most favored nation” policy, “the United States will pay the same price as the nation that pays the lowest price in the world”.
Asian pharmaceutical actions fell on Monday in the back of the news, with shares of Samsung Biologics, SK Biopharmaceuticals and Beigene down 4%, 2.5%and 7.9%, respectively. In India, Sun Pharma fell by more than 5% to carry out losses on the NIFTY 50 reference index.
Trump attempted a similar decision during his first mandate, but he did not progress in strong resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.
The American president suggested on Sunday that he would see any similar opposition from the sector, despite large pharmaceutical groups and commercial organizations that have made donations to its inauguration.
“The contributions of the campaign can do wonders, but not with me, and not with the republican party,” wrote Trump. “We are going to do the right thing, something that the Democrats have fought for many years.”
Responding to the proposed decree, the Lobbys group in the Phrma industry said that “government prices fixing in any form is bad for American patients”. He added that “to reduce medicine costs for Americans, we must approach the growing share of medical costs ranging to system intermediaries”.
The group was one of the many representative organizations which continued the last Trump administration for trying to restrict the prices of medicines, which finally led Joe Biden’s white house to completely abandon the proposals.
Administration Biden subsequently inserted a drug negotiation provision in the inflation reduction law, targeting 10 specific drugs in a decision which was to save nearly $ 100 billion over 10 years.
This decision also caused a multitude of legal proceedings from the pharmaceutical industry, but most failed.
The sector has also carried out a public relations campaign, saying that such regimes discourage innovation and reduce research expenditure.
Trump rejected the claims of his article, writing that drug companies “would say for years that these are research and development costs, and that all these costs were and would, without any reason, be carried by the” sugar “of America, alone”.
He said that, following the planned order, “our country will finally be treated fairly”.
The managers of the White House would have tried to force a provision to reduce the price of medicines in an imminent budget bill, but were faced with a decline in senior republicans including the president of the Mike Johnson Chamber.
Additional reports from William Sandlund to Hong Kong
