EO Could Lead to Export Restrictions on Pharma
President Donald Trump touted his plan to get foreign health purchasers to pay more for pharmaceuticals, and U.S. consumers to pay less, as he signed an executive order seeking to equalize those prices.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
In addition to using tariffs to pressure the EU and other developed countries to accept higher prices for medicines, the executive order asks drug companies to charge less in the U.S., bringing the prices to the same level.
Trump said poorer countries will be allowed to pay less for medicine than the developed world, but for similarly situated countries, "they're going to have to pay more for healthcare, and we're going to pay less. Special interests may not like this very much, but the American people will."
"We will add it on to tariffs, if they don't do what is right," he added.
The executive order says that if pharmaceutical companies don't agree to price targets -- developed in the next 30 days -- based on prices across developed nations, the FDA could "potentially modify or revoke approvals granted for drugs, for those drugs that [may] be unsafe, ineffective, or improperly marketed." It said the Commerce Department shall "consider all necessary action regarding the export of pharmaceutical drugs or precursor material that may be fueling the global price discrimination."
The order was silent on what authority would be used to take either the export restrictions or the tariff action, but it did say that foreign countries' insistence on lower prices as a condition for accessing their markets could be an "act, policy, or practice that may be unreasonable or discriminatory or that may impair United States national security and that has the effect of forcing American patients to pay for a disproportionate amount of global pharmaceutical research and development ... ."