President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday morning that aims to drastically reduce the prices of prescription drugs in the United States.
"Starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing," Trump told reporters. "We’re subsidizing others' healthcare in countries where they paid a small fraction of what — for the same drug that we pay many, many times for, and will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from big pharma."
"For the first time in many years, we will slash the cost of prescription drugs and we will bring fairness to America. Drug prices will come down by much more," he said, adding that prices would come down upwards of 90 percent.
Trump said that Americans pay 70 percent more for prescription drugs than they did in the year 2000, and that the US "has the highest drug prices anywhere in the world by sometimes a factor of five, six, seven, eight times. It’s not like they’re slightly higher."
"Even though the United States is home to only four percent of the world’s population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two-thirds of their profits in America," he added.
He said that the prices around the globe would "equalize," saying that it's called "most favorite nation."
"We are going to pay the lowest price there is in the world and we will get whoever is paying the lowest price. That’s the price that we’re going to get.
A fact sheet put out by the White House stated that the executive order directs the US Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce to "ensure foreign countries are not engaged in practices that purposefully and unfairly undercut market prices and drive price hikes in the United States."
The order also directs the administration to "communicate price targets to pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish that America, the largest purchaser and funder of prescription drugs in the world, gets the best deal."
If companies fail to offer most-favored-nation pricing, the order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to "(1) propose rules that impose most-favored-nation pricing; and (2) take other aggressive measures to significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs to the American consumer and end anticompetitive practices."
