Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that the catalyst behind President Trump’s executive order to reduce prescription drug costs for Americans was the European nations’ price-fixing.
Even though Americans are only 4.2 percent of the world's population, they account for 75 percent of pharmaceutical company revenue, which ends up with Americans paying more for prescription drugs than everyone else.
“It's not really the pharmaceutical industry's fault. It's the European nations who are price-fixing, and taking advantage of us, and so we are now going to fix that,” Kennedy told Newsmax.
Trump’s executive order says that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and the Commerce Department should ensure that other countries pay their fair share in research and development for pharmaceuticals. It also calls for using a Most Favored Nation policy, which sets drug prices based on their prices in foreign nations, to lower prescription drug prices here. In 2020, a federal judge blocked this program’s implementation.
In addition, the EO would enable Kennedy to “establish a mechanism through which American patients can buy their drugs directly from manufacturers who sell to Americans at a Most Favored Nation price, bypassing middlemen.”
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Kennedy believes that the EO will stick, and talked to many pharmaceutical company CEOs last week to tell them what may be coming.
“The pharmaceutical companies know that it's time, and we've been meeting with them, and you know this was not a surprise to them. I had meetings with most of the CEOs last week, and I gave them at least a veiled warning that this was coming, but they knew it was coming. We have ways of enforcing this if we can't come to an agreement,” Kennedy said.
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