President Trump is right to make lowering drug prices one of his priorities. American consumers are sick of paying two, three, even five times more for medications than the prices outside our borders.
A proposal the Administration is considering, however, threatens to make the problem much worse.
It is true that the United States is in effect subsidizing the rest of the world’s drug costs. Since countries like Canada and France, with economies that are overtly socialist, impose strict government price caps on drugmakers, pharmaceutical companies charge Americans more to make up the difference – a situation that is neither fair nor free-market.
So, when the Trump Administration reportedly began soliciting proposals to implement a so-called “Most Favored Nation” (“MFN”) policy for pharmaceuticals, it understandably attracted attention.
On the surface, the move to a pharmaceutical most-favored-nation strategy sounds like a tough, Trumpian fix. In reality, it represents the same, discredited and dangerous idea the Left has been pushing for years, just repackaged in MAGA talking points.
The positive, and practical solution to this inequitable treatment – one that actually is quintessential Trump — is to stop subsidizing drugmakers who treat American consumers like suckers and view our vast pharmaceutical market as a bottomless piggy bank. The problem is, no Big Pharma company wants to give up the substantial federal research dollars, tax credits, and government contracts now provided by Uncle Sam.
The one action that would cause Big Pharma to stand up and take notice would be for the Trump Administration to seriously threaten to cut off that largess unless Big Pharma starts treating American consumers as fairly as it treats foreign governments. This actually could start to solve the problem of unfairly high domestic drug prices.
Conversely, however, moving to implement a most-favored-nation strategy for pharmaceuticals would impose a backdoor price control scheme imported straight from the European socialist playbook. And at the center of this scheme is a group backed primarily by John Arnold.
The same John Arnold who worked at Enron, cashed out with an $8 million bonus while the company imploded, and then reinvented himself as a left-wing mega-donor funding some of the most radical ideas in American politics. Arnold bankrolls left-wing organizations that fund anti-police prosecutors and push to eliminate bail for violent criminals, all while helping to install surveillance tech that spies on everyday Americans. He now seeks to tell U.S. leaders how to fix their healthcare system.
Arnold has endorsed MFN personally and, through Arnold Ventures, apparently thinks MFN would help the federal government cut costs. In this, he is mistaken. Nothing positive can come from shoe-horning drug pricing here at home into systems employed in countries with centralized, government-run healthcare; systems in which healthcare treatment is rationed and access to new medicines delayed, with powerful, unelected bureaucrats at the helm.
Were such a socialized pharmaceutical regime to be implemented here, America’s medical marketplace would be effectively controlled by bureaucrats in those countries holding the power to cap drug prices. The likely result would be delays in introducing important new drugs into the U.S. market, including those to fight cancer and treat Alzheimer’s.
Such dire predicaments are not just hypothetical. Just look at the results of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which imposed similar price controls — drug developers responded by pulling back on research into rare diseases and pausing trials.
Republicans who buy into this MFN scheme aren’t fighting Big Pharma — they’re doing John Arnold’s bidding. And if they are not careful, they will likely pay the price at the ballot box. Once voters find out that pharmaceutical most-favored-nation means fewer lifesaving drugs, longer wait times, and more government interference — in a word, “Obamacare 2.0” — the backlash could be swift and brutal.
Conservatives need to seriously start fighting for real, market-based reform, not importing bureaucratic rationing from France and calling it patriotism. Pharmaceutical most-favored-nation needs to be shut down quickly, before it gains a toehold here at home.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served previously as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia, serves as head of Liberty Guard, and is the immediate past president of the National Rifle Association of America.