President Donald Trump is exerting pressure on major pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices in the U.S. and wants them to commit to his most-favored-nation pricing policy within weeks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during an interview with Axios.
On July 31, Trump sent letters to 17 leading drugmakers, including Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY), Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), and Merck (NYSE:MRK), outlining the steps they should take to adjust U.S. prices of their pharmaceutical products to match those in other developed countries in line with the MFN policy.
U.S.-based Gilead (GILD), Bristol Myers (BMY), J&J (NYSE:JNJ), Regeneron (REGN), Amgen (AMGN), and AbbVie (ABBV) also received Trump’s letters along with EU drugmakers Merck KGaA (OTCPK:MKGAF), Sanofi (SNY), GSK (GSK), AstraZeneca (AZN), Novo Nordisk (NVO), Roche (OTCQX:RHHBY), and Novartis (NVS).
“The president’s going to say that you drug manufacturers cannot sell here unless you sell there at a higher price. Stop being willing to sell to them at such a low price,” Lutnick said ahead of a Sept. 29 deadline Trump granted to drugmakers to comply with the policy.
According to Lutnick, President is deploying multiple executive branch agencies to achieve the outcome. “I just got the call from [Health Secretary] Bobby Kennedy. I got a call from [CMS Administrator] Mehmet Oz and said, ‘OK, let’s get to work on this,'” Lutnick added.
“The president was talking about this all day on Saturday. … He was talking about ‘we got to drive these prices down.”