Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Newsmax on Monday that the impetus behind President Donald Trump's executive order to reduce prescription drug costs for Americans was price-fixing by European nations.
Kennedy said Americans account for 75% of pharmaceutical company revenue but are just 4.2% of the world's population. The result: Americans are paying more for prescription drugs than the rest of the world.
"It's not really the pharmaceutical industry's fault," Kennedy told "Rob Schmitt Tonight." "It's the European nations who are price-fixing, and taking advantage of us, and so we are now going to fix that."
Trump's executive order calls for U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and the Commerce Department to ensure that foreign countries pay their fair share in pharmaceutical research and development. Kennedy said the U.S. would fund Big Pharma's research and development while other countries would benefit from lower prices.
The executive order calls for lowering prescription drug prices through a most favored nation policy, which sets drug prices based on their prices in foreign nations. A federal judge blocked its implementation in 2020 before the Biden administration abandoned the program.
The order also calls for Kennedy to "establish a mechanism through which American patients can buy their drugs directly from manufacturers who sell to Americans at a most favored nation price, bypassing middlemen."
He said by eliminating middlemen, which is what he called pharmaceutical benefit managers, is a carrot to the pharmaceutical industry.
Kennedy, who talked to many pharmaceutical company CEOs last week to alert them of what might be on the horizon, said he believes the executive order will stick.
"The pharmaceutical companies know that it's time, and we've been meeting with them, and you know this was not a surprise to them," he said. "I had meetings with most of the CEOs last week, and I gave them at least a veiled warning that this was coming, but they knew it was coming.
"We have ways of enforcing this if we can't come to an agreement."
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Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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