Saw this article, completely infuriating. The Mayor of Port Huron complaining ‘we are not responsible for this’. Port Huron voted 68% for Trump. They are, in fact, responsible for this.
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Deplorables gotta be deplored. 
Interesting but he says prices will increase for everyone outside the US.
How?
Secondly, it’s not everyone else’s fault the US health care system is a bust.
I have an incling this is closing the gate after the horse has bolted.
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Gotta get your profits from somewhere…
And people can go shopping elsewhere too.
The idea of cheaper medication in the US is solid but coming from Trump something stinks about it. Maybe I’m wrong.
But it still doesn’t the core issues of US healthcare being an insurance based system that has been milked for profits and delivers variable quality of healthcare.
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Depends. In the UK and many other countries I believe they’ve been purchasing medications on a governmental level so it’s something similar where the governments can effectively set the price because of the size of the market. However, in other countries where this is not the system I don’t think there’s a way to effectively do that? Depending on the details of how it works, we may be looking at patented medication for which generics aren’t available, in which case it’s pretty much a monopoly.
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It’s actually more than that, because they can decide whether a particular medication can be prescribed on the NHS or not. That gives a huge amount of leverage, because you are effectively telling a pharmaceutical company to have a reasonable slice of a big market, or a huge slice of next to bugger all.
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Yeah, I wasn’t sure as to the precise mechanics on that, it was more an off-the-cuff thought about the relative bargaining power. I think the US already had something similar with Medicaid?
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Possibly. I know that the EU tried to replicate the NHS system during the Covid pandemic, which was quite successful from a cost perspective. I’ve no idea what Trump’s thinking is. It probably involves tariffs somewhere.
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Probably thinking “The art of the deal”
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Surely just another simple solution to a complex problem. Just because all he has to do is sign a piece of paper. Being a moron surrounded by morons what else is there to do?
If it doesn’t work just fudge it by making up numbers multiply numbers by 4 then divide that by 4. Works for everything.
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Yeah I know the NHS has some kind of price protection thingy going on.
I just cant see US pharma accepting lower profits from the US market without something compensating elsewhere
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Well they despise it in the NHS.
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Which is why US Pharma should not be allowed anywhere near the NHS.
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My solution to reducing pharmaceutical prices is to import from India. Oh wait what are the tariffs?
Yes. It is simply a cynical flail in attempt to gain some positive coverage at a time when things are bad. But when you stop to consider what this means we see how unlikely it is get close to what he says he wants to do.
He tried something similar similar at the end of his first term as a late campaign election play, after promising it since the very beginning, but the courts immediately put a hold to it because even things he can direct executive branch offices to do have a rule making process they have to go through that this did not.
What they tried before focused only on Medicare drugs, and then only a portion of coverage. Given what HHS has the authority to do, even through normal rule making processes, it is unlikely this effort, if real, would be able to go further.
Biden passed something that does do this as part of the IRA, but because it is a complex process to negotiate and implement, it phased in the benefits. Some of the first tranche of price reductions for medicare drugs have only recently come in, but more are due each year. It seems likely that what the administration wants to do is get positive press coverage for an effort to reduce prices and then be able to stand back and take credit for reductions the IRA was already on schedule to bring about.
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If they lose their price premiums when selling tot he US market they will be incentivized to try to reclaim some of that lost profit in other markets.
In reality its more likely they try to squeeze the other segments of the US market that would not be covered by this. Some of that may even be paid for by HHS.
Again, this is all assuming there is any interest in actually doing anything here, and that is an incredibly generous interpretation of what is happening.
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Certainly an element of “what is in it for me and my mates”!
If a system like the NHS,medicare in Oz and a bunch of others can control the market,what happens here and can happen anywhere, is increasingly the drugs are tested and approved from overseas are cheaper,just as good that is where private systems could crash and burn.
No joy in manufacturing drugs if they stay in your warehouse!
My expectation is that those companies will see a hit to their stock value, as they simply don’t have the pricing power to recover all of those losses. This will in turn lead them to reducing the rate of investment in R&D, likely as theatrically as possible,
The actual change in the share price will in short order probably give us a read on how extensive the commodity price effect is. If Merck et al are about what they were, the market will have realised this is just more smoke and mirros
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