Has Trump Actually Done Anything About Drug Prices?
Donald Trump’s promise of sweeping health-care reform has not come to pass. While the president campaigned heavily on assurances to “repeal and replace Obamacare” on “day one” with an unspecified plan for every American to have affordable health care, his claims have now been diluted to a focus on “drug prices.”
One of his first comments on the release of the Mueller report was that it was a distraction from the need to “get back to infrastructure, get back to cutting taxes, get back to lowering prescription drug prices.”
Trump’s calls to action have been interspersed with claims of victory. In March of last year, Trump promised, “You’ll be seeing drug prices falling very substantially in the not-too-distant future, and it’s going to be beautiful.” Just 10 months later, in his 2019 State of the Union address, this had ostensibly already happened: “As a result of my administration’s efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years.”
Drug prices are still increasing. While growth in spending on drugs has slowed in recent years, total national spending continues to grow. Americans spend more than anyone else in the world. The average person spends $1,025 per year on medication—an inflation-adjusted increase of elevenfold since 1960.
Still, the cost of drugs accounts for only about 10 percent of the country’s health expenditures, and this trend has been steady for almost two decades. Exorbitant as drug prices are, a relatively small 24 percent of people say they have any “difficulty affording medications.” It is medical bills that cause much more angst and financial hardship, and are now the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Slowing the growth of pharmaceutical costs would put only a small dent in the much bigger problem.
The focus on drug pricing is also curious as an ideological outlier for Trump. Among goals that have included protecting the fossil-fuel industry, deregulating big banks, and handing out corporate tax cuts, the president could be expected to celebrate the $1.1 trillion pharmaceutical sector and the many jobs it provides. Instead, at least rhetorically, here he has chosen to side with consumers.
So what has Trump actually done about drug prices?
Last year, the administration did indeed lay out some proposals in a “’’ that included a long list of niche policy bullet points. Most notable among them were efforts at transparency and simplification: eliminating some rebates paid out by drug companies that obscure the price of drugs, using international comparisons for pricing Medicare drugs, and requiring drug companies to include prices in advertising.
