Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, Donald Trump posted a long, and barely lucid, wall of text to his very unpopular social media site announcing a new executive order that he says will cut prescription drug prices by 30% to 80%. We will spare you the whole thing, which you can read here, if you are a glutton for punishment. The key portion is this:
I am pleased to announce that Tomorrow morning, in the White House, at 9:00 A.M., I will be signing one of the most consequential Executive Orders in our Country's history. Prescription Drug and Pharmaceutical prices will be REDUCED, almost immediately, by 30% to 80%. They will rise throughout the World in order to equalize and, for the first time in many years, bring FAIRNESS TO AMERICA! I will be instituting a MOST FAVORED NATION'S POLICY whereby the United States will pay the same price as the Nation that pays the lowest price anywhere in the World. Our Country will finally be treated fairly, and our citizens Healthcare Costs will be reduced by numbers never even thought of before. Additionally, on top of everything else, the United States will save TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
That was sent out at 3:22 p.m. yesterday. We would bet very large sums of money that, half an hour earlier, he was playing golf.
We feel a responsibility to pass something like this along, just in case something comes of it. Thus far, the details are so vague, it's not terribly easy to evaluate the plan. That said, the obvious question that occurs to us is this: "If there is an easy way this goal could be achieved, with just the stroke of a presidential pen, then how come some previous president (including Trump himself) didn't do it?"
In turn, we came up with only three vaguely plausible answers. You could conclude that Trump is the first president who is not in the thrall of "Big Pharma," and so is willing to take them on. It's a bit hard to imagine, however, that Lyndon B. Johnson, the president behind Medicaid, and Barack Obama, the president behind the Affordable Care Act, were in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, while Trump—who is more than willing to, for example, take free planes from the Qatari royal family (see above)—is the one willing to stand on principle, for the little guy. It's possible, but not especially plausible.
The second answer we came up with is that Trump's maneuvering, whatever it is going to be, is not lawful, and he's willing to go there, where Joe Biden, Obama, etc. were not. This was certainly the case when Trump tried to change prescription drug prices via fiat during his first term. And while Congress did not stand up to him then, and is not likely to stand up to him now, the pharmaceutical industry filed lawsuits aplenty, and Trump was defeated. Heck, the XO he issues today may well be an exact copy of the one he issued 6 years ago (not unlike what happened with the 2020 Republican platform).
The third and final answer we came up with is that, as is his wont, Trump is going to make some small change on the margins, and then claim it's a radical, earth-shaking transformation of American life as we know it. The early returns suggest this may well be the case; note that bit about how "the United States will save TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS." Americans spend about $750 billion a year on prescriptions, and only half of that is under the auspices of the federal government (Medicare, etc.). If Trump manages to reduce the federal spend by 50% (dubious), it would take about 5 years to be $1 trillion in savings, and thus a decade to be "trillions." In that case, his claim here would not be a lie, exactly, but it would be very misleading. "We will save trillions" implies some level of immediacy, not sometime in the fairly distant future.
In any case, today we'll learn what the big plan is. Again, we suspect that it is much, much smaller than Trump promised, which is so often the case with him. (Z)