President Donald Trump likely won’t do away with a landmark process that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers, even as he moves to erase Joe Biden’s other historic policy accomplishments.
But Trump will likely make some changes to those price talks, and it may not require help from Congress.
“Trump is looking to nibble around the edges of the law,” said Matthew Kupferberg, a partner in Frier Levitt’s life sciences group, adding the president is “not looking to completely abandon the drug negotiation process at this point.”
It’s still unclear which way Trump will lean, however. While some lawmakers and health policy experts said Trump could weaken the negotiations in a way that helps the pharmaceutical industry, other experts said he could double down and try to save patients and the federal government even more money to outdo his predecessor.
The path he takes could have huge stakes for the prices 68 million Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. pay for their medications. It will also have big implications for companies like Novo Nordisk, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Merck, among others whose drugs were included in the first two rounds of talks.
The negotiations are a key provision of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, that aims to lower prescription medicine costs for seniors and save the government nearly $100 billion in Medicare spending over the next decade. The pharmaceutical industry fiercely opposes the price talks, arguing in a flurry of lawsuits that they threaten profits and discourage drug innovation.
The Trump administration has offered few specifics on its approach to the negotiations, apart from saying in January that it will aim for “greater transparency” in the ongoing second cycle of the process and hear any ideas for improving it from external stakeholders.
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