Trump’s Drug Pricing Deals Favor Big Pharma Over Patients, Public Citizen FOIA Finds
WASHINGTON, D.C. – In response to a Public Citizen Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released two of the 27 confidential agreements between drugmakers and the Trump administration. The agreements spell out the terms of Trump’s “most-favored-nation” pricing deals, the lynchpin of Trump’s claims to have lowered Americans’ prescription drug prices.
The released agreements, including the first White House deal with Pfizer and Eli Lilly’s deal on blockbuster GLP-1s, are both heavily redacted, making it impossible to verify several of the Trump administration’s claims. But the unredacted text shows that President Trump exaggerated his achievements and that the deals expire at the end of his term, according to a new Public Citizen analysis of the texts.
“Trump’s drug pricing deals are a mirage, designed to convince Americans that he’s taken significant action on drug pricing while creating minimal if any downside for Big Pharma,” said Peter Maybarduk, Access to Medicines Director for Public Citizen. “The texts show Trump handing out favors to Big Pharma, undercutting his own models to lower prices, and throwing the support of the U.S. government behind corporate decisions to deny medicines entirely to other countries.”
The unredacted text includes dates, definitions, direct-to-consumer prices and agreements, and dispute resolution procedures, among other terms, and shows that:
- Lilly’s blockbuster GLP-1s are carved out from discounts required of other drugs subject to most-favored-nation (MFN) agreements. If Novo received a similar carveout for GLP-1s it produces, it could reduce potential savings from the GENEROUS Medicaid pilot program by $1.7 billion.
- In the Lilly text, the U.S. blesses drugmakers discontinuing entirely the supply of a medicine to other countries, to manage their U.S. MFN prices, a practice that threatens patients’ health.
- The public cannot rely on the Administration’s previous representations as to the MFN agreements. For instance, Pfizer’s MFN agreement states that its terms supersede the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation’s GENEROUS model, which outlines how state Medicaid programs get MFN pricing, if there are conflicts.
The documents were obtained after Public Citizen filed a lawsuit in January to compel a response to the FOIA request.
“The Trump administration continues to favor secrecy in these limited disclosures under FOIA today, which show its template for most favored nation, in part, but black out the prices, product lists, and information needed to assess whether Trump accomplished anything of substance,” Maybarduk added.