Trump Announces Pricing Deals With Nine Drugmakers

The companies were the latest to agree to sell drugs to Medicaid and directly to consumers at discounted prices. President Trump said he would soon begin similar negotiations with health insurers.

President Trump on Friday announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices, the latest step in his bid to try to align U.S. costs with the lower drug prices in European countries.

Mr. Trump has now reached deals with 14 of the 17 drugmakers to which he sent letters in July demanding that they lower prices. The nine companies participating in Friday’s announcement were Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Roche’s Genentech unit, Gilead, GSK, Merck, Novartis and Sanofi.

Drugmakers have been eager to strike deals with the administration in hopes of avoiding punitive regulatory action that could cut deeply into their profits. Over the last few months, Mr. Trump has announced similar agreements with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, EMD Serono, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

In a White House briefing announcing the deals, Mr. Trump and top health officials framed the agreements as part of a focus on affordability at a time when the administration is facing intense scrutiny for not doing more to stem rising prices.

The announcements were made as health insurance subsidies in the Obamacare marketplace were set to expire at the end of the year, which will likely to drive up premiums for millions of Americans.

Standing at the podium, the president also took the opportunity to threaten the health insurance industry. Mr. Trump said he would call insurance executives to Florida or the White House soon to discuss lowering premiums.

“They have to make less, a lot less,” he said. Stocks of major insurers, including UnitedHealth Group, CVS and Cigna, fell after Mr. Trump’s remarks.

“Health plans are doing everything in their power to shield Americans from the high and rising costs of medical care, and we welcome any opportunity to discuss common-sense solutions to lower costs for everyone,” said Mike Tuffin, chief executive of AHIP, a major trade group for health insurance plans.

Under the deals announced on Friday, manufacturers will offer some of their drugs through websites where Americans can bypass insurance and use their own money to buy certain products. The offerings have focused on drugs often prescribed by primary care doctors rather than more specialized, expensive treatments for conditions like cancer.

To help patients navigate that process, the Trump administration plans to create a site called TrumpRx.gov, which will direct patients to the drugmakers’ own websites. Officials put up a promotional version of the TrumpRx website this fall and said they plan for it to be operational in January.

Drugs that will be made available in this way include Amgen’s Repatha, for lowering cholesterol, at $239 a month; GSK’s asthma inhaler, Advair Diskus, at $89 a month; and Merck’s diabetes medication Januvia, at $100 a month.

Many of these drugs are nearing the end of their patent protection, meaning that the arrival of low-cost generic competition would soon have prompted manufacturers to lower their prices.

In other cases, the direct-buy offerings are very expensive and out of reach for most Americans.

For example, Gilead will offer Epclusa, a three-month regimen of pills that cures hepatitis C, for $2,492 a month on the site. Most patients pay far less using insurance or with help from patient assistance programs. Gilead says on its website that “typically a person taking Epclusa pays between $0 and $5 per month” with commercial insurance or Medicare.

The drugmakers also said they would introduce new medicines in the United States at prices comparable to what they ask other wealthy countries to pay.

And the companies agreed to sell most of their products to state Medicaid programs, which provide health insurance for low-income Americans, at the prices they offer to other wealthy countries.

People on Medicaid already pay nothing or very little in out-of-pocket costs. Federal law caps those costs at $8 per prescription for people with the lowest incomes.

Medicaid is already legally required to get the lowest drug prices in the United States, which are often comparable to those in European countries.

Still, administration officials said the deals would bring significant savings for some drug purchases. Bristol Myers Squibb said it would provide Eliquis, a widely used blood thinner, to Medicaid for free.

A new, lower price for Medicare of $231 per month, enabled by a Biden-era law, will go into effect in January. Medicaid’s current prices for Eliquis are not public, and Bristol Myers Squibb did not return a request for comment on what it now charges Medicaid programs.

“It’s very likely that Medicaid programs were already getting it for free or close to free,” said Dr. Benjamin Rome, a health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

As he has done while announcing the other drug pricing deals, Mr. Trump on Friday made claims about impossible price decreases of up to 800 percent. At another point, he boasted: “This represents the greatest victory for patient affordability in the history of American health care by far.”

At least initially, most Americans won’t see changes to their out-of-pocket costs resulting from the deals. In some cases, they could end up paying more if they use their own money to go through TrumpRx when they could have paid less by relying on insurance.

“The bottom line is that the agreements will not decrease prices for most Americans,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, who studies pharmaceutical policy at Harvard Medical School.

Executives for each of the drugmakers appeared with Mr. Trump and other cabinet officials in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. They arrived long before him, standing awkwardly on live video until his arrival. When Mr. Trump entered the room, he began the event by displaying and touting his new “gold card” — a way for immigrants to obtain visas for $1 million each, plus processing fees.

After his initial remarks, the pharmaceutical executives each gave a short speech. Most thanked the president, saying it was an honor to lower their prices.

In exchange for some lower prices, the companies secured three-year exemptions from any tariffs that Mr. Trump might have imposed on imported pharmaceuticals, administration officials said. Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to levy punishing tariffs on imported medicines but has not followed through.

The three major drugmakers that have yet to reach deals with the administration are AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson and Regeneron. Representatives for those companies all said they were still in talks with the administration.

Mr. Trump said that Johnson & Johnson and a few other companies would announce price-cutting deals in the coming days.

In the United States, prices for brand-name drugs are three times as high, on average, as those in other wealthy nations. Mr. Trump has long complained that the United States is unfairly subsidizing lower prices in European countries, a view echoed by many pharmaceutical executives.

The deals announced on Friday do not address the high costs of most drugs already on the market that are covered under private insurance or other government health insurance programs like Medicare. Those costs are borne by U.S. employers and consumers who pay in the form of taxes, health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.

The new agreements also stop short of regulation that would force drugmakers to lower their prices, an approach Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully in his first term.

This year, the Trump administration has gone through the administrative process of developing and reviewing proposals for drug pricing regulation, a threat that has helped bring drugmakers to the negotiating table.

According to notices on a government website, reviews were completed this week for proposed rules titled “guarding U.S. Medicare against rising drug costs” and a “global benchmark for efficient drug pricing.” But no announcements have emerged from the process.

Reed Abelson contributed reporting.

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