How dare you raise prices by 9%! Trump blasts high drug prices , this time directly naming Pfizer.
A week ago, Pfizer, the largest independent drugmaker in the U.S., once again dramatically increased the prices of some of its drugs, taking the lead in the fight against Trump's "health care reform". A week later, on Monday (July 9), Trump once again blasted the high pricing behavior of large U.S. drugmakers via Twitter, naming Pfizer.
For the problem of high drug prices in the United States, the former U.S. Secretary of Labor (1993~1997), former U.S. President Barack Obama's Economic Transformation Advisory Board members, the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman (Goldman), Professor of Public ****policy Institute, Robert Reich (Robert B. Reich) in an interview with the "Daily Economic News" reporter said , high drug prices because the cost of these drugs is partly borne by the government, on the other hand, because the pharmaceutical manufacturers through high pricing to earn profits, than they are low pricing, have a larger market to earn much more profit. Lake also pointed out to reporters that "some evidence suggests that big pharma spends more on marketing, advertising, and political lobbying than they even spend on research and development, and that's one of the things that pushes up drug prices."
Trump said in his tweet, "Pfizer and other drugmakers should be ashamed of their unjustified price increases. They are just taking advantage of the poor and others who can't afford to defend themselves, but at the same time are offering discounted prices to other countries in other regions like Europe. We will respond!"
Pfizer, which was up nearly 1 percent on the New York Stock Exchange before Trump's tweet above, saw its shares plunge 0.7 percent in the 10 minutes after the release, but quickly turned from a decline to a rise, eventually closing up 0.13 percent. The S&P 500 health care index and the Nasdaq biotechnology index also quickly recovered most of their lost ground.
This time, Trump's bombardment of drugmakers has been much less powerful than it was in January 2017. At the time, Trump, who had just won the presidential election, went so far as to say that the drugmakers were "attempted murderers," after which shares of the major drugmakers fell. Now, 18 months later, Trump has yet to announce any major specific policies, although he has tweeted about the decline in the price of some drugs in that time.
In an effort to address high drug prices in the U.S., Trump announced the launch of the American Patients First strategy at the end of May this year. In a speech on May 30 local time, Trump also suggested that "some of the major pharmacy chains will announce ...... voluntary, significant price reductions within two weeks."
According to the Financial Times, just a month after Trump made those remarks, Pfizer took the lead in singing the opposite tune, once again dramatically raising drug prices. Pfizer raised the prices of 100 drugs it manufactures at the time, the report said, with most of the price hikes being slightly more than 9 percent, well above the U.S. inflation rate, which is about 2 percent at this stage. The list of price increases includes Pfizer's best-known drug, Viagra, which went into effect on July 1st.
In fact, this is not the first time Pfizer has raised the price of a large number of drugs this year. Some of Pfizer's drug prices have risen nearly 20 percent this year, if you count a series of price increases the company implemented earlier this year. For example, as of July 1, the average wholesale price of 100 milligrams of Viagra had risen 19.8 percent to $88.45 from $73.58 earlier this year.
Last January and June, Pfizer also raised the price of Viagra, with a cumulative increase of 27.5 percent. The price hikes were also well above the U.S. inflation rate of about 2 percent. In addition, Pfizer's drug Chantix, which helps smokers quit, has risen nearly 17 percent in price over the year, and a bottle of Xalatan eye drops used to treat glaucoma has risen from 89.38 U.S. dollars to 107.05 U.S. dollars, an increase of 19.8 percent. But Pfizer said the price adjustment was only for 10 percent of the drugs, with most of them unchanged, and that if discounts and rebates were factored in, the impact on the price patients actually pay for the drugs would be minimal.
The Financial Times reported that the practice of raising prices twice a year, in January and June, has become commonplace among U.S. pharmaceutical companies. However, in response to increasing political scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry, many large U.S. pharmaceutical companies are now raising prices only once a year, in January.
In response, Professor Robert Reich said the practice of large US drugmakers being able to raise prices at will at the beginning and middle of each year "is because there is no regulation of drug prices in the United States, and the incentive for drugmakers to raise prices is to make as much profit as possible and to maximize shareholder returns."
Professor Lake also pointed out that while the price of drugs in the United States is influenced by supply and demand, the U.S. government also plays a very important role in the process of pricing drugs - both by helping consumers to bear the cost of medicines, and also through (the U.S. National Institutes of Health) funding for drugmakers to partially share the cost of research and development.
For years, drug pricing in the United States has been the subject of intense debate within the pharmaceutical community and society as a whole, and health care reform has been one of the Trump administration's top priorities. That's why at the end of May, Trump announced new health care reform measures and launched the "American Patients First" strategy, which aims to solve the problem of high drug prices in the United States.
Whether high drug prices are a fair reflection of drugmakers' research and development costs, Prof. Lake said: "Big pharma spends huge sums of money on marketing and publicizing their drugs, as well as on political lobbying and donations. In fact, there is some evidence that they spend more on marketing, advertising and politics than they do on research and development. The goal of the drugmakers is to make as much profit as possible, and while they don't want patients to wait to die, they don't see it as their responsibility to make drugs available to all patients."
"In the early 1990s, for example, the U.S. Congress enacted a law that prohibited the government from using its enormous bargaining power over pharmaceutical companies to negotiate lower drug prices. The entire pharmaceutical industry lobbied for this law." Prof. Lake added.
Source:? Phoenix