Aug. 31 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said Monday that his administration has reached deals with nine more pharmaceutical companies to offer lower-priced drugs to state Medicaid programs.
With the new companies — Alcon, Astellas Pharma, BeOne Medicines, BridgeBio, CSL, Kyowa Kirin, Sun Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals and UCB — that makes 26 companies who have agreed to the “most favored nation” price policy the White House has pushed since last year.
The deals tie drug prices to those companies charge in other wealthy nations, which can be much lower. They include voluntary price cuts by manufacturers for drugs sold to the public and the government through the TrumpRx website. In return, many of the manufacturers get breaks on Trump’s tariffs and other perks.
The companies also agreed to invest at least $19.6 billion in U.S. manufacturing, the White House said.
“With today’s announcement, we now have 26 companies representing 90% of the domestic pharmaceutical market, and the other 10% are also coming in,” Trump said, CBS News reported. “They have no choice.”
The details of the deals, including the amount of the discounts and which drugs they include, have not been announced publicly. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, has said he’d be willing to release the details, but the department has not yet done so.
Politico reported that, in most of the deals so far, the companies have announced price drops for a subset of their products. The state Medicaid programs then have the ability to buy those products.
