On Lowering Prescription Drug Costs
Somewhere among ridiculing political opponents, shaming generals and threatening cities, and letting the government shut down this week, Donald Trump and Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, reached a “voluntary” agreement to lower some prescription drug prices for Medicaid patients.
It arrived amid threats of huge tariffs rather than reason, but let’s give this administration, like the last, credit for achieving some notional sanity about pricing that more matches that in industrialized countries elsewhere. Pfizer also talked of building U.S. manufacturing sites, a complicated process that can take a decade.
It was a good news headline, seemingly reflective of what we might expect of a White House of either party.
The obvious hope remains that Pfizer’s rivals will do likewise to keep business parity and consider extensions to Medicare and commercial insurers.
Still, more than a cursory look suggests that the change will affect a smaller part of the population that the White House was suggesting, that it will not drop medicine prices across the board, nor change the origin of medical manufacturing anytime soon.
Pfizer did the deal to avoid Trump’s absurd proposal to put 100% tariffs on importing its brand-name products from where they are made.
https://www.dcreport.org/2025/10/03/on-lowering-prescription-drug-costs/
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