OAN Staff Blake Wolf
10:25 AM – Monday, May 12, 2025
President Donald Trump officially signed an executive order (EO) on Monday called DELIVERING MOST-FAVORED-NATION PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICING TO AMERICAN PATIENTS — aimed at dramatically dropping the prices of prescription drugs.
Trump, alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), criticized the current pharmaceutical pricing system, vowing that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from Big Pharma.”
“The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and yet funds around three quarters of global pharmaceutical profits. This egregious imbalance is orchestrated through a purposeful scheme in which drug manufacturers deeply discount their products to access foreign markets, and subsidize that decrease through enormously high prices in the United States,” it begins.
“The principle is simple – whatever the lowest price paid for a drug in other developed countries, that is the price that Americans will pay,” Trump continued. “Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90%.”
“Starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing. We’re subsidizing others’ healthcare, the countries where they paid a small fraction of what for the same drug that what we pay many, many times more for,” he continued.
“Even though the United States is home to only 4% of the world’s population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two thirds of their profits in America. So think of that with 4% of the population, the pharmaceutical companies make most of their money. Most of their profits from America. That’s not a good thing.”
RFK Jr. also spoke to the press in relation to the new EO. He congratulated Trump and expressed that he “never thought that this would happen in my lifetime.”
“I have a couple of kids who are Democrats, are big Bernie Sanders fans. And when I told them that this was going to happen, they had tears in their eyes. Because they thought, this is never going to happen,” Kennedy Jr. stated. “And we finally have a president who is willing to stand up for the American people.”
“He can’t be bought, unlike most of the politicians in this country. And he is standing here for the American people… There’s writers like Elizabeth Warren or Robert Reich are saying that President Trump is on this of the oligarchs – there has never been a president more willing to stand up to the oligarchs than President Donald Trump,” he continued. “And I’m very, very proud of you, Mr. President, for your courage. I’ll say, because I don’t want to be crude, your intestinal fortitude, your stiff spine, and your willingness to stand up for the American people.”
Additionally, the White House has also planned to map out potential “workarounds” that pharmaceutical companies may utilize to avoid the price decreases by directing the “U.S. Trade Representative and Secretary of Commerce to take action to ensure foreign countries are not engaged in practices that purposefully and unfairly undercut market prices and drive price hikes in the United States.”
“The Secretary of Health and Human Services will 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,” the White House continued. “If drug manufacturers fail to offer most-favored-nation pricing, the Order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to: (1) propose rules that impose most-favored-nation pricing; and (2) take other aggressive measures to significantly reduce the cost of prescription drugs to the American consumer and end anticompetitive practices.”
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