You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. It is a tale as old as time. But apparently, with its latest “Most Favored Nation” executive order on drug pricing, the Trump administration has stumbled upon a solution to this conundrum.
Or so they would have you believe.
The entire phenomenon centers around the hotly contested Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare. On one hand, the Trump administration is litigating before the Supreme Court in favor of the entire law being struck down as unconstitutional. On the other hand, the administration would like to use an obscure provision within the very same law in order to implement its new drug pricing mandate.
Can you see the problem?
Before we can even discuss the merits of price controls and their implications for our healthcare system, simple logic should have dismissed this latest action when it was first proposed. If you believe a law to be unconstitutional and invalid, how can you then use that law to carry out a particular policy agenda? The numbers simply do not lie. And perhaps this is why this particular executive order stayed under lock and key until September 13th—nearly two months between its signing and when it officially went into effect.
If you still are not sold, that is OK. After all, the Supreme Court could very well uphold the ACA as constitutional. If that happens, it would be easy to assume that President Trump’s executive order would then be in the clear. Fortunately, these assumptions are far from accurate and there is plenty of policy and precedent standing in stark opposition to this executive action.
A “most favored nation” pricing model is an extreme form of international price indexing (IPI), where price caps on certain drugs are put in place based on an average price obtained from a select group of other countries. These arbitrary price controls would have devasting effects on our access to groundbreaking drugs. The U.S. would be basing its drug market off of Europe, where socialized, restricted medicine is the norm. And such an approach exceeds the statutory authority of the executive branch. Under basic constitutional separation-of-powers principles, “sweeping” and “very dramatic”—the president’s own words—changes to major federal programs must be authorized by Congress. To date, Congress has flatly rejected any form of international price controls. Period.
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The executive branch hopes to carry out its ambitious plan through an obscure clause in the Affordable Care Act, whereby modest authorization for testing “pilot projects” in underserved populations is authorized. According to President Trump, however, this new order contains “the most far-reaching prescription drug reforms ever issued.” But an unprecedented new program that will disrupt the entire healthcare sector is a far cry from a modest “pilot project.”
Simply put, the authority to execute this administration’s latest drug pricing mandate simply is not there. The same administration is fighting to strike down the very law it is using for this order. Congress has already plainly rejected the international pricing model. And the ACA itself does not grant the statutory authority for such a measure in the first place.
Until recently, this administration had a good record on healthcare—fighting to protect American innovation and promoting measures such as rebate reform and price transparency. Why, then, reverse this approach in favor of dangerous and unconstitutional executive actions?
President Trump is at his best when he is fighting for America, and he must return to supporting our pharmaceutical innovators that will get us through the current health crisis. We must stop “global freeloading” off of American innovation and negotiate more favorable deals with foreign governments. We need them to contribute their fair share toward research and development costs for new treatments and vaccines that are changing the world. These are solutions that will lower drug prices.
The president is a dealmaker, and that is exactly what we need during COVID-19. America must leave the cake outside and return to the head of the table.
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