Trump Actions to Undermine Drug Prices Will Cost Medicare Recipients Money

By Jeff Nesbit, Former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

One of the nearly 200 executive orders that newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed on Tuesday reversed several critical policies that President Biden had put in place. Among those was lowering drug costs for Americans. With the stroke of his pen, Trump removed a $2 price cap on certain generic drugs, did away with a provision that would improve access to high-cost therapies for Medicaid recipients, and ended an effort to expedite the evidence-gathering process for new drugs.

To put it another way, President Trump just opened the door for drug prices to skyrocket. Without the implementation of these and similar plans focused on reducing costs, Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries will continue to face high out-of-pocket expenses for prescription drugs, and will have limited access to important—sometimes essential—prescriptions. We all know too many Americans already facing challenges paying for prescription drugs.

President Biden’s Executive Order 14087 decried that Americans spend far more than “those in other countries for prescription drugs, and one in four Americans who take prescription drugs struggle to afford their medication.” The text painted a dire picture of America’s difficulty with expensive drugs: “Nearly three in ten American adults who take prescription drugs say that they have skipped doses, cut pills in half, or not filled prescriptions—all due to the high cost.”

President Biden took bold action to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the price of insulin is capped at $35 per month, many vaccines (including those for Shingles and RSV) are now available at no cost to the roughly 50 million individuals on Medicare’s prescription drug program, “Part D,” and—starting this year—the amount of money people with Medicare Part D will pay out of pocket for drugs is capped at $2,000.

One of the biggest provisions in the law gives Medicare the power to directly negotiate drug prices with manufacturers for the first time in the program's history. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) negotiated on the price of ten drugs and signed agreements with each participating pharmaceutical company that lowered the cost for drugs used to treat diabetes, stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. As his last official act, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra announced the selection of fifteen additional drugs for price negotiations.

Together, these twenty-five drugs account for about $91.5 billion in total gross covered prescription drug costs under Medicare Part D. Lowering costs will not only benefit individuals on Medicare—it will help secure the whole program for the future.

It’s as plain as day: President Trump did away with these cost-saving plans so that his friends in the pharmaceutical industry could profit. Many administrations have tried to take on exorbitant price-gouging of seniors and failed. President Biden succeeded, and many Americans could enjoy these savings for years.

The new Trump Administration has been so brazen as to increase costs on prescription drugs, making it all-too-evident with whom it stands…and it’s not America’s seniors.