Trump, who has often bucked the traditional free market orthodoxy that the GOP has promoted, said as a candidate that he would use the power of the government to reduce drug costs. (Photo: Bloomberg)
Conservatives are worried about President Trump’s proposals to reduce the cost of prescription drugs.
The Trump administration is supporting a bill that would limit price increases for drugs in the Medicare Part D program, forcing drug-makers to reimburse the government if their price rises faster than inflation. However, the bill has drawn pushback from Republicans and conservative advocacy groups, who fear the president is adopting liberal ideas.
A website set up by the American Conservative Union urges supporters to reject what it describes as liberal, big government policies. The site decries Trump’s proposal as “directly out of the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton government health care takeover playbook.”
Conservative group FreedomWorks has also run online ads warning of “socialist-style price controls.”
Trump, who ran a populist campaign that in many ways bucked the traditional free market orthodoxy that the GOP has promoted, said as a candidate that he would use the power of the government to reduce drug costs. He accused pharmaceutical companies of “getting away with murder.”
Thus far, however, the Trump administration has not implemented any significant regulations to control drug costs. In July, the administration abandoned a proposal aimed at encouraging pharmaceutical companies to give discounts to consumers, rather than pharmacy benefit managers.
Last month Trump also promised to write an executive order to set the price that Medicare pays for drugs to whatever the price of that drug is in the lowest-cost country. However, there has been no follow-up on those comments since, and experts expressed skepticism that the president could accomplish what he promised.
On a much smaller scale, the administration is currently drafting a Medicare pilot program focused on a small group of drugs. In the pilot, Medicare would pay based on an international price index that includes a dozen other industrialized countries.
“It’s a very interesting dynamic, in that the Republican Party, from a philosophical standpoint, has generally favored free markets,” Katie Mahoney, the vice president for health policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Stat News last month. “So it is somewhat strange that a conservative administration is putting out proposals that seem to have a tinge of socialist background.”
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