However, the plan has resulted in few measurable results so far. Experts say the current system lacks transparency and consumer protections. Some say without tighter regulation, the industry will pay only lip service to reducing the burden on consumers.

“The rate of increases has slowed down, but prices haven't decreased,” said Stephen Schondelmeyer, a University of Minnesota professor of pharmaceutical economics who runs its research program on drug prices and public policy. He said drug companies show temporary pricing restraint around elections and other times of public pressure, but then go back to raising drug prices.

According to the study:

—There were fewer price increases this year from January through July than in comparable prior-year periods, but companies still hiked prices far more often than they cut them. This year through the end of July, there were 4,412 brand-name drug price increases and 46 price cuts, a ratio of 96-to-1.

—In June and July, after Trump predicted industry price cuts for prescription drugs, there were 395 price increases and 24 decreases. The two-dozen cuts were up from the 15 decreases in those same two months last year, but increases still outpaced decreases by a ratio of 16.5-to-1.

—The median price increase, meaning half were higher and half lower, was 5.2 percent in June and July of 2018, down from 8 percent in that period in 2017.

—The median price cut this June and July was 11 percent, much smaller than in comparable periods in prior years.

Neither the drug companies nor politicians are doing enough to address the problem, public polling suggests. According to the AP article, “ … 77 percent of Americans consider U.S. prescription drug costs 'unreasonable' and fewer than a quarter approve of how Trump is addressing the problem, according to a mid-August national poll of 1,002 adults from West Health Institute, a nonpartisan health care research group.”

Not waiting for the federal government, a number of states have taken their own legislative and regulatory steps to moderate drug prices, according to the New York Times. That story reports that 24 states have passed 37 bills in 2018 designed to address rising drug costs. However, the pharmaceutical industry has tied up some of those efforts with legal challenges.

The Trump Administration, for its part, says it will take time to reform the industry. Secretary Alex Azar, the administration's point person for efforts to lower drug prices (and a former drug industry executive), said his agency continues to work for lower prices.

“I'm not counting on their altruism or their cooperation,” Azar said of the pharmaceutical companies, on Sept. 13. “We're going to change the rules of the road to make enduring changes to the incentive systems built into the channel.”

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