It has been two months since the president released his road map for lowering drug costs that seems to lead nowhere, and about a month since he predicted the “big drug companies” would announce “voluntary massive” price cuts. Here’s where things stand:
A congressional investigation has found that the drug company Novartis got more out of its $1.2 million payment to Mr. Trump’s “personal attorney” Michael Cohen than had been known. Meanwhile, several other drugmakers defied Mr. Trump’s lofty prediction by raising their prices substantially, while his administration shot down a proposal that would have helped individual states lower their drug costs.
Taken together, the developments help explain why, a year and a half after Mr. Trump took office, prescription drugs cost more than ever.
Let’s start with Novartis: When a lawyer for Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic-film star suing Mr. Trump, revealed that the drug company was among those who had made payments to Mr. Cohen after the election, Novartis executives insisted they’d had only one meeting before concluding that Mr. Cohen didn’t know enough about health care policy to be helpful. But Senate Democrats have since found that the company actually had several meetings, that drug-pricing policies were on the agenda and that a number of proposals Novartis pushed for made it into the White House plan.
