Conservative Heavyweights Pan Trump’s ‘Socialist’ Drug Pricing Plan

A group of more than four dozen conservative and free-market activists penned a letter to members of Congress Thursday opposing the Trump administration’s new drug pricing model.

The letter, sent to members of Congress, argued that the White House’s “most favored nation” drug pricing model released late last week would “import socialist price controls and values into our country.” It also suggests the program will reduce global competitiveness in medical innovation and “reduce cures available to patients while causing an unacceptable degree of drug shortages.”

“While supporters of this proposal correctly identify the unique problems facing the American health care system — namely, wealthy countries paying artificially lower prices for prescription drugs than the U.S. and the fact that this depresses innovation and inflates our costs — MFN would not solve these problems,” the letter continued. “In fact, it would exacerbate them.”

Among the signatories to the letter were: President of the nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist; Pete Sepp, president of the National Taxpayers Union; conservative pundit and former Trump adviser Stephen Moore; president of the nonprofit Taxpayers Protection Alliance, David Williams; and Ryan Ellis, president of the conservative nonprofit Center for a Free Economy.

The groups who wrote Thursday’s letter argued that Trump’s drug pricing plan is essentially a manufacturer incentive program “based on the flawed assumption that American manufacturers are not already fighting as hard as they can against foreign price controls.”

The White House announced in December that it had confirmed commitments to most favored nations pricing by more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies, requiring those firms to charge U.S. consumers prices on par with those of other peer countries.

On Feb. 5, the White House also unveiled its TrumpRx drug portal, which allows pharmaceutical companies under the MFN initiative to market directly to consumers by linking out to private drug websites.

“You’re going to save tremendous amounts of money,” Trump said during the announcement. “We have many of them, and in a very short period of time, we’ll have just about all of them.”