Trump’s Strategy for Cutting Drug Prices Is DOA

Trump didn’t say a whole lot in his press conference on Wednesday, but his remark that America needed to revise its process for buying pharmaceuticals made some enormous waves. “They’re getting away with murder,” he said. Big Pharma lost almost $25 billion in market value in just 20 minutes.

From the size of the market’s reaction, you would assume that pharma must really be getting away with murder. After all, the left has been insisting for years that one way to fix our costly health care system is to finally allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices the way that other countries do. And it’s hard to say that this is unreasonable: as probably the world’s single largest purchaser of pharmaceuticals, the American government ought to have a lot of bargaining power. Why in the world would Congress bind the government’s hands by refusing to let them negotiate volume discounts then?