Washington DC [US], August 4 : US President Donald Trump while speaking to reporters on Sunday (local time), said that he aimed to lower the prices of pharmaceutical drugs with the Most Favoured Nation prescription drug pricing plan.
Trump said before boarding Air Force One in Allentown, Pennsylvania that the US will pay the lowest price just like other European nations do.
"We want the same price as Europe gets. We want the same price as other countries get ... We will pay as low as the lowest nation in the world. The next big move is going to be the price of drugs because you could buy something in London or in Germany some place... sometimes 1/10th the price of what it costs to buy it in New York... We're not doing that anymore," he said.
Trump is increasing pressure on major drugmakers to bring their US prices in line with the far lower ones available to patients in other countries. However, industry experts don't expect the pharmaceutical companies to comply, CNN reported.
Earlier on Thursday, Trump sent letters to 17 major pharmaceutical company CEOs on with a list of demands, including that the manufacturers extend "Most Favored Nation" pricing, the lowest price paid for a drug in a peer country, to all drugs provided to Medicaid enrollees. The US president gave the companies 60 days to comply.
The directive stems from an executive order Trump signed in May, when he demanded drugmakers start offering US patients lower prices or face consequences.
Meanwhile the US President continued to bat for the tariff policy saying that it would bring down debt. "We're going to pay down debt. We have a lot of money coming in, much more money than the country's ever seen, by hundreds of billions of dollars... we should've done this many years ago," he said.
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