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Try to Make Any Sense of Trump’s Latest Bragging About Drug Prices

The president’s boasts about his pharmaceutical cuts aren’t just imaginary—they’re also gibberish.

Speaking with reporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania Sunday evening, Donald Trump suggested that one of the administrative wins that Republican lawmakers should hinge their campaigns on during midterm elections is the “tremendous drop in drug prices.”

“You know we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent,” Trump said. “Because we’re going favored nations, we want the same price as Europe gets, we want the same price as other country gets.”

If Trump’s boast were true, drug companies would actually be paying consumers to take prescription drugs.

“Over the years, 25-30 years ago, it started where they were charging us much more and I put an end to it with a letter that you saw last week,” Trump said.

But the president has not tangibly lowered drug costs. Instead, his office issued letters Thursday to pharmaceutical companies, plainly asking them to lower their prices while vaguely threatening to deploy “every tool in our arsenal” to combat “abusive” prices should they refuse.

Trump has previously posited that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries was due to American federal subsidies that he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that’s not reality: the U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, first world countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage.

Trump’s first term rule—“Most Favored Nation”—was focused on lowering the cost of Medicare payments on certain drugs, but the plan barely made it out of the White House. The policy was blocked by federal courts shortly after it was announced in late 2020, and was then rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

In May, Trump penned an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no deal, the U.S. would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there hasn’t been any noticeable movement in either direction.

“I don’t know how anybody could win an election if they’re on the other side of that issue,” Trump said Sunday. “So we’ll be dropping drug prices, it will start over the next two to three months.”

“But not just 50 percent or 25 percent, which normally would be a lot, because the rest of the world pays much less for the identical drug, and we’re going to be paying the same thing,” Trump said, promising that Americans would pay the same price for drugs as the company’s lowest international cost.

Other things that researchers point to as potentially resolving high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to restrict out-of-pocket, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform.

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