Washington Republicans Refuse to Lower Prescription Drug Costs While Misleading Voters About Their Inaction

As Senate Republicans Keep Blocking Reform, President Trump Has Been Promoting a “Missing” Executive Order on Prescription Drug Prices That “Remains Largely A Secret,” Despite Claims It Would be Issued Yesterday and Has Already Lowered Costs

The refusal of Washington Republicans to rein in the cost of prescription drugs remains a massive “political liability for the party in 2020” — but instead of enacting reform, they’re trying to deceive voters into thinking they’ve taken action. A new report from the New York Times finds that President Trump has been promoting a nonexistent executive order tying prescription drug prices in the United States to those in other developed nations. The text of Trump’s “missing order,” the policy of which has been opposed by many congressional Republicans and the pharmaceutical industry, “remains largely a secret” despite the president’s claims that he would issue the order yesterday and that it has already lowered drug prices.

While the House passed sweeping legislation to slash drug prices last year, the bill “stalled in the Senate” because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it is “dead on arrival.” H.R. 3 would lower costs on everything from insulin to breakthrough cancer treatments, but Senate Republicans are standing in the way because their donors oppose provisions like negotiating prices on critical life-saving drugs. Even after drug companies announced new price hikes this year, McConnell and his caucus have “flatly refused to consider” the House bill and blocked any significant progress on “an issue of vast importance to voters.”

“While Democratic candidates are still fighting for bold action to lower prescription drug costs, Mitch McConnell and Republicans in Washington have refused to act because they’re in the pocket of special interests,” said DSCC spokesperson Helen Kalla. “Seventy days from the election, voters are tired of the years of broken promises on bringing down prescription drug costs from Republican incumbents across the country.”

New York Times: Trump Keeps Promoting a Drug Order That No One Has Seen
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Margot Sanger-Katz
Aug. 24, 2020

Key Points:

• President Trump has made his executive order tying prescription drug prices in the United States to the prices paid in Europe and other developed nations… a centerpiece of his campaign for re-election.

• The problem: No such executive order has been released.

• A month after a big White House signing ceremony, where Mr. Trump stood in front of a mock pharmacy and promised to “end global freeloading on the backs of American patients and American seniors,” the text of his directive remains largely a secret.

• He has boasted of his efforts in campaign advertising, on the official White House website and on Twitter. But despite the president’s vow that he would issue the order on “August 24th at 12 o’clock” if the drug companies did not act on their own, the public’s only glimpse has come from an Associated Press photographer, who captured its first and last pages.

• A White House spokesman declined to comment on the missing order.

• In a recent tweet, the president also claimed — inaccurately — that the “favored nations clause” order had already lowered drug prices. (It also inaccurately described the timing of the signing.)

• While the president has implied that his “favored nations” order would affect all pharmaceuticals, in reality it would affect only a small fraction of drugs: those, like chemotherapy infusions, that are administered in a doctor’s office. Even to do that, an order alone would not be enough to change policy; that would require notice-and-comment rule-making that could take months or longer.

• Mr. Trump has embraced the issue of high drug prices since his 2016 campaign, promising that he will fight the powerful pharmaceutical industry to deliver relief to American consumers. But the administration has delivered little policy on drug prices… Other efforts, like the one to establish an international price index for certain drugs, were proposed and shelved.

• The industry’s opposition to international index pricing is shared by many Republicans in Congress, who say they think adopting drug prices from countries where prices are set by the government is effectively importing socialism. Joel White, a Republican strategist, called it “really bad policy,” because it amounted to “importing other countries’ price controls,” and “misguided” because it was targeted at medicines given in doctors’ offices or hospitals.

• Polls have consistently shown that the public trusts Democrats more than Republicans on matters related to health care. Democrats rode their emphasis on health care to control of the House in 2018, and they expect to make it a major issue again this year.

• At the end of 2019, the House passed a bill aimed at lowering all drug costs by empowering the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical manufacturers — a policy Mr. Biden has embraced — but the bill stalled in the Senate.

• The House bill would also link prices for up to 250 common drugs in the United States to prices overseas. It would also apply the benchmarking more broadly, to include retail drugs and to apply to drugs bought by people with private insurance, not just those in Medicare.

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