Washington, D.C — In a meandering press event, Donald Trump issued a meaningless executive order on drug pricing that contained no policy specifics and was designed to distract Americans from the Republican assault on health care. In response, Protect Our Care Chair Leslie Dach issued the following statement:
“Don’t be fooled: Trump has no real intention of lowering drug prices for the American people. This is all smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that Republicans are working right now to rip away health care from millions of families in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations – including drug companies. While Trump’s record on lowering drug prices includes failure after failure, Democrats have actually delivered lower drug costs, and they are working to lower them even more and for more Americans.”
Background
President Trump’s latest executive order is nothing more than a distraction from the fact that Republicans are ripping away health care from millions and raising costs for working Americans to give tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
- Republicans are making the largest cut to Medicaid in history, threatening coverage for the more than 70 million Americans who rely on the program. Under the Republican scheme, millions of Americans could lose coverage, including seniors, children, veterans, people with disabilities, workers who don’t get insurance through their jobs, and people who take care of their children or elderly parents.
- Republicans are raising premiums and health care costs for 24 million Americans by taking away critical tax credits from working families. If Republicans take away these tax credits, they’ll be taking away health care. Costs will skyrocket by an average of $2,400 for millions of families, and 5 million people will lose their health care altogether.
- Republicans are doing Big Pharma’s bidding, increasing costs for seniors and taxpayers and lining the pockets of big drug companies by weakening Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices and handing Big Pharma their biggest win in decades.
President Trump has always been all talk and no action when it comes to drug prices. President Trump had four years to lower drug costs during his first term and accomplished nothing.
- Drug prices soared under President Trump. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that list prices for 20 of the top 25 drugs covered by Medicare Part D saw price increases between three and nine times the rate of inflation in 2017. A report from AARP found that the annual cost for 267 brand-name medicines commonly used by seniors increased by 5.8 percent in 2018, more than twice the rate of inflation. In 2019, more than 4,000 drugs saw price increases averaging 21 percent according to Rx Savings Solutions. And in 2020, prices increased faster than inflation for half of the drugs covered by Medicare.
- President Trump installed Big Pharma executives in key administration posts and handed out huge tax breaks to big drug companies. President Trump installed a former Eli Lily executive, Alex Azar, as his secretary of Health and Human Services, and his appointment of Scott Gottlieb at the FDA was described as “music to pharma’s ears.” Other pharma lobbyists who led Trump’s health policy included chief of staff at FDA, Keagan Lenihan, who joined the administration after lobbying for the drug distribution giant McKesson, and former Gilead lobbyist, Joe Grogan, who served as a senior advisor on health policy and now heads the foremost conservative health policy think tank the Paragon Institute. During his first term, Trump handed out tax breaks to drug companies that cut Big Pharma’s effective tax rate by 40 percent but his administration did nothing to lower drug prices.
- President Trump’s actions in office did nothing to lower drug prices. President Trump repeatedly promised that he would allow Medicare to use its buying power to negotiate drug prices directly with suppliers, but after meeting with pharmaceutical executives early in 2017, Trump abandoned that pledge, calling it “price fixing” that would hurt “smaller, younger companies.” In 2018, Trump released a “blueprint” to lower drug prices, but the main proposals were put on hold or blocked by the courts. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s rule to require drugmakers to disclose prices in television ads. Trump also announced that drug makers agreed to participate in a voluntary program to limit insulin costs for certain Medicare beneficiaries, which officials acknowledged could actually result in higher premiums for beneficiaries and taxpayers. Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reducing drug costs, but experts pointed out that the measures were very limited and none were immediately enforceable. Pharma CEOs themselves said they were “not expecting any impact” from these executive orders.
- President Trump’s April 2025 executive order to lower drug prices is overly friendly to the drug industry and includes one of their top legislative priorities. Trump’s April 15 Executive Order instructs Congress to side with big drug companies and undermine Medicare drug prices negotiation, giving drug companies four additional years to charge as much as they want for certain drugs before they can be selected to have a lower price negotiated.
This executive order is more of the same meaningless fluff.
- President Trump asked pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily reduce their prices in his first term, and it never worked. These drug companies are driven by profit and greed.
- It is unclear how such a plan would be operationalized or legal. The executive order includes no detail on the authority the administration would use to execute the plan.
- This executive order is more about padding Big Pharma’s profits abroad than it is about lowering costs in America.
Americans deserve real progress to lower drug prices, that expand Medicare’s authority to negotiate lower drug prices.
- By passing the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats lowered drug prices for people with Medicare without a single Republican vote. They gave Medicare the authority to negotiate lower prices for drugs for the first time ever, which will save seniors $1.5 billion and taxpayers $6 billion in the first year alone. The Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program is hugely popular and has the support of nearly nine in ten voters. It also capped the monthly cost of insulin at $35, capped annual out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for people with Medicare, and penalizes drug companies for raising prices faster than inflation. Find the facts on the state-level impact of the Inflation Reduction Act here.
- While Democrats are fighting to negotiate lower prices for more drugs and expand lower drug costs to more Americans, Republicans are fighting to raise drug costs by limiting Medicare’s power to negotiate lower costs. 63 percent of voters, including 55 percent of Republicans, want Congress to expand Medicare price negotiation by covering more drugs and people. President Trump’s plan is to deliver a major blow to Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices by giving drug companies the ability to charge as much as they want for certain drugs for an additional four years before they can be selected to have a lower price negotiated. This change will cost taxpayers about $10 billion or more while raising out-of-pocket costs for seniors and padding profits for big drug companies. In granting this giveaway to drug companies, Republicans want to raise out-of-pocket costs for some of the most popular and profitable drugs in America, including drugs like Eliquis and Ozempic.
- Americans deserve leaders that are not in the pocket of Big Pharma. Republicans are making it crystal clear they are in Big Pharma’s pocket, and will put corporate profits ahead of seniors’ lives every time. No matter what they say, their actions speak louder than their words. Republicans are slipping a huge giveaway to Big Pharma into a reconciliation package already loaded with tax breaks for CEOs and greedy corporations like drug companies, meaning Big Pharma’s multimillion-dollar investments at Mar-A-Lago are paying off big time. Their scheme to exempt drugs that treat rare disease from negotiation creates a major loophole for drug companies to exploit to extend their monopolies and continue price gouging the seniors who rely on these drugs. Republicans are selling out seniors, boosting Big Pharma’s profits, and giving drug companies huge tax breaks.