Donald Trump has made a habit of delivering on his campaign promises since his inauguration. One of those key promises was to deliver much needed relief to the one in five Americans skipping doses or not filling prescriptions due to high drug costs.
For far too long, profiteering had been the drug of choice for the pharmaceutical industry. Fortunately, big pharma’s needed rehabilitation for their dependency on price gouging the American people will be immediately addressed going forward.
With the president’s recent announcement on drug prices, relief can be expected via the “American Patients First” blueprint. The plan is designed to provide positive changes and consumer relief with respect to the price of pharmaceuticals. It moves some drugs from Medicare Part B to Part D and puts more power in the hands of private sector actors who will negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical manufacturers. Direct negotiations on drug prices is a proven model that pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) have used for years to help keep drugs prices low for their clients.
The announcement by the president also marginalizes the power of the “tangled web of special interests” i.e. the big pharma lobbyists, who have poured nearly $2.5 billion on direct lobbying and campaign donations to members of Congress over the past 10 years. As I pointed out in a previous column, 9 out of every 10 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a whopping 97 out of 100 senators have taken campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies.
This clearly has influenced legislators since none of the 119 bills aimed at reducing drug costs introduced over the last decade have succeeded in producing actions that could actually bring down costs, such as allowing access to overseas drugs, or allowing Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate prices.
Another announced component of the Patients First Blueprint is the institution of incentives for lower list prices. This will also be a big win for patients and a direct rebuke to pharmaceutical manufacturers who have been driving up the cost of drugs in recent years. A 2016 Reuters analysis of price spikes on the 10 most popular drugs found the manufacturer increases added billions to American spending for some of the most common conditions, including arthritis, asthma, and abnormal cholesterol.
One particularly insidious example of gouging was the case of the drug Daraprim. Back in September of 2015, specialists involved in infectious disease protested the gigantic overnight increase in the price of the over 60-year-old drug that is commonly used for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.
Daraprim had been acquired in August of 2015 by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up company being run by a former hedge fund manager. The per-tablet price was immediately raised to $750 a tablet from $13.50. This raised the annual cost of treatment for some patients by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"We are talking about some pretty intense, sometimes lifesaving medications, things like rheumatoid arthritis, drugs like Humira, Enbrel. For drugs that treat Crohn's disease and psoriasis. I mean, it's pretty serious stuff. The increases are dramatic. Humira went up 126 percent. There are few other consumer products that go up this way," Lisa Gill of Consumer Reports told "CBS This Morning" at the time.
In addition, new changes to the formularies, such as allowing more substitution to give plan sponsors more power when negotiating single-source generics, is a victory for those actors working to reign in the price of drugs, as they will now have more leverage to negotiate for lower costs.
When President Trump took the podium at the Rose Garden ceremony announcing the Patients First Blueprint he said we will have “tougher negotiation, more competition and much lower prices at the pharmacy counter.” By empowering private sector to come up with solutions and negotiate on behalf of American patients, the president has done just that.
We can mark this down as a strong first step towards keeping a promise made by the president, and a major blow to greedy lobbyists and D.C. swamp monsters. We will all need to be vigilant that Congress and the Department of Health and Human Services work together to follow through on the president’s direction, but this speech was vital to making progress where pharma has blocked it for so long. Well done, Mr. President.
Julio Rivera is an entrepreneur, small business consultant and political activist. He contributes to RightWingNews.com and NewsNinja2012.com, and had previously covered boxing and baseball for the now defunct "The Urban News" in his native Paterson, N.J. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.