President Trump’s top health chief pushed back Monday against critics of the White House’s drug pricing proposal, who had accused the president of moving away from a campaign pledge to allow Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices.
“I don’t know what they’re talking about,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on the Hugh Hewitt show. “This is the president doing exactly what he said. He’s going to harness the power of Medicare to negotiate on behalf of seniors and taxpayers. And he’s going to have improved bidding for these programs. I don’t get it. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The latest blueprint from the White House, released Friday, contains a provision that allows Part D plans in Medicare, the program’s drug prescription plan, to prompt pharmacy benefit managers and insurers to share more of the rebates they get from drug makers with consumers. It also would allow private companies more negotiation power on the drugs delivered to a hospital or doctor’s office, through the Medicare Part B program.
The proposal does not allow the Medicare program to directly negotiate, which would involve more government authority. Trump had said during his campaign that he would back such a proposal, and his critics seized on his recently unveiled drug plan as ineffective without it.
In a speech later in the morning on Monday, delivered at HHS headquarters in front of hundreds of people, Azar said that he and Trump had discussed Medicare negotiations several times.
“The idea of direct negotiation in Medicare has come up,” he said, but that they had determined the approach ultimately presented was the “smart, effective” way.
“This is how we follow through on his promise to do tough bidding and negotiation for our seniors,” he said. “We formulated this plan with fixing that problem and the president is following through on his promise.”
Azar, who is a former executive at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, stressed during his speech and during his radio segment that he belied the proposal was in line with Trump’s campaign promise.
“They are not listening, and they are not reading, because what we are doing is more sweeping than anybody’s ever proposed before,” Azar said of critics during his radio interview. “We are unshackling them to go after Big Pharma and finally get deep discounts in parts of the program that had been walled off, drugs that had been held in what are called these six protected classes where they didn’t have power to negotiate.”
Democrats have proposed allowing the Medicare program to negotiate lower prices through giving HHS more authority. Other developed nations, including Canada and European countries, pay less for pharmaceuticals than U.S. consumers do because of negotiating power by their government-run, single-payer healthcare systems. The U.S. Medicare program instead allows private entities to negotiate, through contracts with the government.
Azar during his radio interview called proposals from critics who said Trump had not fulfilled a campaign promise “cheap, political gimmicks” and said the administration’s proposal would be more effective in lowering costs. Allowing the secretary to directly get involved would result in rationing care or denying someone access to medicines, he said.
“You need these big, bad middlemen, these Part D drug plans, to hit these companies hard,” he said.
Azar also hit members of the media for how they reported on the issue.
“Do you think the mainstream media wants President Trump to be viewed as being successful and tough and bringing down drug prices for our citizens? Probably not, and so we’re going to have to fight through and around them so people understand just how comprehensive, how bold and how much this is in keeping with his promise to use the power of Medicare, but the right way, the effective way to negotiate discounts for our people and enhance the bidding in our programs,” he said.
