Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Friday shrugged off questions about whether he can be trusted to lower drug prices because of his prior work for the pharmaceutical industry.
Azar spoke with reporters Friday after President Trump spoke about tackling high drug prices. The Trump administration released a blueprint Friday that details several avenues for lowering high drug prices but does not embrace changes such as giving Medicare the power to negotiate directly with drugmakers for lower prices.
“Trust us by our actions and by the deeds in the blueprint,” Azar said at the White House press briefing. “It is the hardest-hitting plan ever proposed by a president.”
Azar ran the U.S. division of Eli Lilly from 2012 to 2017. His time in the pharmaceutical industry was a topic of rampant criticism from Democrats during his confirmation as HHS secretary last year.
Azar said drugmakers currently have no incentive to lower list prices of pharmaceuticals.
“You put yourself at a disadvantage with lower list price,” he said. “Every other person in system makes money off a high list price.”
Azar said the “entire system” is built for increased prices and creates perverse incentives for drug companies to charge more. The administration’s blueprint says consumers don’t benefit enough from the rebates negotiated among insurers, drug middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers and drug companies.
The blueprint says increasingly higher rebates in federal healthcare programs could be causing high list prices overall and leading companies to charge higher prices.
It points to efforts to create incentives for lower list prices, including making drug prices in the federal Medicare and Medicaid programs more transparent to hold drugmakers accountable for price increases. HHS also plans to ask the FDA to evaluate requiring drug makers to include list prices in their advertising.
HHS also released a request for public comments on other ways to limit list price incentives.
