According to unnamed sources and as reported by The Hill, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have been meeting with pharmaceutical companies as of late to ask them to voluntarily cut drug prices. If the negotiations are successful and these companies do decide to cut prices (which is extremely unlikely), then it would mean that the Trump administration could tout the benefits of the President’s drug pricing plan instead of waiting for regulatory actions to be implemented and take effect.
Towards the end of last month, Trump announced that “in two weeks” drug companies would “announce voluntary massive drops in prices.” But as that two-week deadline draws closer, officials still have not provided many details regarding what the president meant with those remarks.
“We are working with stakeholders across the spectrum including drug companies, [pharmacy benefit managers], distributors, patients, health care professionals, physicians, insurers, etc., to respond to President Trump’s call to action and help patients pay less for their prescription drugs,” said a spokesperson for the department of Health and Human Services in an interview with The Hill. The statement came following a question regarding the meetings that have been taking place in recent weeks with drug companies.
But even though Donald Trump and his administration are at least trying to bring down costs of pharmaceutical drugs, the fact of the matter is that voluntary price cuts will never be enough to solve the problem. At the end of the day, Big Pharma is a business that is out to make as much money as they can possibly make, just like every other company in the United States and abroad. To ask pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily cut prices simply doesn’t make any sense for them, and to be frank, most of the ones that the Trump administration have met with thus far have most likely laughed it off.
The fight against Big Pharma
Natural News has been reporting on Big Pharma’s efforts to prevent you from purchasing cheaper alternatives for quite some time now. As Natural News contributor J.D. Heyes explained in an article published in 2016, even though there are currently provisions in place for Americans to buy drugs at cheaper costs, Big Pharma is working day and night to block them. What ends up happening is that pharmaceutical companies essentially team up with Internet intermediaries in order to prevent Americans from buying alternative options from other countries, even though they have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. (Related: Big Pharma conspired to destroy a supply of life-saving cancer drugs by putting profit before people.)
However, these alternative drugs are not as dangerous as the pharmaceutical companies say that they are. As the FDA’s senior associate commission for policy planning and legislation William Hubbard put it, “Discretionary guidelines developed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and enforced by the [Customs and Border Protection] allow American consumers to import a 90-day supply of some prescription medications for personal use, including by bringing them across border checkpoints in personal luggage, or by mailing them from overseas.”
Donald Trump should be commended for at least trying to address the problem of pharmaceutical drug costs, and for keeping the promises that he made out on the campaign trail in 2016. However, he and his team at the department of Health and Human Services need to understand that asking pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily cut the costs of drugs is never going to solve the problem in the long run, and further action will inevitably have to be taken in order to stop Big Pharma’s oppressive campaign.
Read BigPharmaNews.com for more details.
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