Loading ...TRUMP IS A DRUG DEALER
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FROM JEFF CHILDERS
Here is why Democrats will lose the affordability war. Yesterday, Newsweek ran a terrific story headlined, “Donald Trump scores big win on Medicare, Medicaid drug pricing.” In a dramatic White House press conference yesterday afternoon, the President announced that nine more major pharmaceutical companies will join his “most favored nation” drug pricing policy, “bringing down the price of prescription drugs” for Americans. Affordability!
“The deal,” Newsweek reported, “ensures that drugs will be sold at reduced prices, many at the same price as overseas, and purchased through the new TrumpRx platform due to launch in January.” In other words, now that the Democrats have pushed all their midterm gambling chips onto the “affordability” square, President Trump is days away from opening up a website for people to buy common drugs at rock-bottom prices— a website with his name right in the URL.
It requires little imagination to forecast that nearly every American over 18 years old will use that website at one time or another. They’d better have fast servers.
The program will lower some popular drug costs to below co-pay prices (but only if the drugmakers give their drugs long, ridiculous-sounding, and difficult-to-pronounce names. Oh, wait.). Standout examples include:
Boehringer Ingelheim will reduce the price of its Type II diabetes medicine, Jentadeuto, from $525 to only $55.
Merck will reduce the price of its diabetes medication, Januvia, from $330 to $100.
Sanofi will reduce the price of its prescription blood thinner, Plavix, from $756 to $16, and its insulin products at $35 per month’s supply.
Those were remarkable. But one drug captured the headlines— a medication used by millions of Americans: Eliquis, the most prescribed blood thinner on the market. Get this (and I am not making this up): Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer agreed to provide Eliquis for free to all Medicare patients. (Pfizer has certainly made a lot of concessions this year so far. It’s almost like Trump has something on Pfizer. I couldn’t say what, exactly.)
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It’s not just prices. Bristol Myers Squib also agreed to donate 6.5 tons of Eliquis to the national security stockpile, which FYI is probably a fatal dose, also for free, and to invest $40 billion in new U.S. R&D and manufacturing. (Is it my imagination, or in that clip did the BMS pharma executive not smile once during her joyful announcement of pharmaceutical largesse? I mean, look at that face.)
Under every previous Administration, these announcements would trumpet vast new contracts with pharma to sell drugs to the government at insanely profitable prices. Not give stuff away. Not promise to spend billions on new manufacturing. But now we have a dealmaker in chief.
President Trump humbly explained it wasn’t even him. The drugmakers agreed to give away their most popular, most profitable drugs for free or a tenth of the original price —in exchange for nothing back— out of patriotism. “The pharmaceutical companies were difficult, but they also love our country, they knew it was unfair,” President Trump explained yesterday. Filled with a boundless love of country (and a keen sense of self-preservation), the pharma CEOs got on board the affordability express.
Having tackled drugs, Trump promised yesterday to start ‘negotiating’ with insurance companies and convincing them it is also in their best interests to lower their prices, just like drugmakers. These kinds of negotiating sessions can be intense, can sometimes strain the boundaries of professionalism, as seasoned bargainers play ever tougher cards, and often include post-session stops at the urgent care center.
Big drugmakers might be the most reviled industry in the nation, and they clearly knew nobody would listen to them whine about being treated unfairly. Nobody cares about how, if they stop overcharging Americans, then their vast pharma profits might shrink, or how it’s really the middlemen who make the big bucks.
Insurance companies squat with drugmakers in the same leaky boat of unpopularity. Nobody cares that Obama and Congressional Democrats made the rules of the game that insurance companies must play. People blame the insurers, probably because their profits have multiplied ten times. (See, e.g., Luigi Mangione.)
Democrats think that they have Trump over a barrel of expiring Obamacare subsidies, which until now had artificially lowered the prices for about 20 million Americans with “top-tier” plans. Corporate media is salivating at the chance to run twenty million separate tragic personal interest stories next year, informing everyone exactly how much more expensive insurance has become for, say, Sally Witherspoon from Topeka, Kansas, and how she can no longer donate $9 a month to help feed starving African children, and now, to afford her healthcare, must eat out of the same bowl as her least-favorite cocker spaniel.
But … what if Trump ‘makes a deal’ with the insurance companies for them, the insurance companies themselves, to subsidize the plans? And what if nothing actually changes, or policy prices even go down? Who wins then?
More than anything, Democrats suffer from a lack of imagination. They cannot see the possibilities that Donald Trump can. I am beginning to think the Democrats will ultimately regret having picked affordability as their big 2026 issue. They forget who they’re playing against. TAW.
