OPINION:
President Donald Trump sent out letters to 17 major pharmaceutical companies giving them 60 days to comply with an executive order he issued in May demanding they treat the United States as a most favored nation and charge Americans the same or less for drugs as priced for other countries.
And predictably, pharmaceutical officials are whining, warning the price drop would dent profits to the point of compromising research and development capabilities.
Cue world’s smallest violin.
For the last 15 years, Big Pharma has taken the top spot on a list of lobby industries in terms of spending.
This, from the nonprofit Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics — a report released this week: “Pharmaceutical and health products companies continued to dominate the lobbying space in the second quarter of 2025, spending $105.4 million to influence public policy. That industry has spend more on lobbying than any other, during every quarter but one, since 2010.”
The $105.4 million is less than Big Pharma’s first-quarter total of $121.4 million. But it’s “still 38 percent more than the second biggest spender, the electronics industry,” OpenSecrets.org wrote.
Less lobbying.
More research and development.
Seems simple.
So far this year, the pharmaceutical and health products industry has nearly $227 million on lobbying. Compare that to electronics, at a year-to-date total of $141 million; to securities and investments, a total of about $89 million, and to the insurance industry, at about $91 million — and it starts to become clear: pharmaceutical executives and their representatives sure are concerned about the direction of policy on Capitol Hill.
More so than lowering pill prices for Americans, it seems.
In May, while signing his executive order targeting what he described as the “unreasonable or discriminatory” prescription drug prices that Americans were forced by pharmaceuticals to pay, Trump vowed the “United States will no longer subsidize the health care of foreign countries,” and said, “Big Pharma will either abide by this [Most Favored Nation] principle [for America] voluntarily or we will use the power of the federal government,” CNN reported.
According to the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of. Medicine, Americans in 2022 paid nearly three times more for all drugs, both brand-name and generic, than 33 other countries. For every dollar paid for drugs in other countries, Americans pay $2.78, NCBI wrote. A couple other stats from the report: For brand-name drugs, Americans in 2022 paid 422 percent higher than what citizens of other countries paid; for insulin, Americans paid about 10 times the amount charged in France and the United Kingdom, about eight times the prices in Japan and about seven times the cost in Germany.
Meanwhile, “the gap is widening over time,” NCBI wrote.
It’s a classic case of Reagan-esque “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” warning. Politics, bureaucracy and greed — it’s been a boon for Big Pharma. Citizens for Responsibility for Ethics in Washington, over a ten-year period, examined the size of the drug pricing lobby and found the number of companies that reported tracking this issue “more than quadrupled” between 2013 and 2018, and that 22 of Forbes magazine’s top 25 largest drug and biotech companies spent a total of $80 million on drug pricing lobbying during this five-year span. What exactly are they petitioning politicians to do?
“Many of the nation’s largest pharmaceutical companies hire lobbyists to oppose … bills that were aimed at controlling drug prices,” CREW wrote, in 2018.
Big Pharma often gets a pass because they’re supposedly in the nonpartisan, nonpolitical business of helping people’s health, and because they’re private companies in a capitalistic country. But those lines of argument just don’t hold true any longer.
Politicians and bureaucrats have tinkered in the free market to the point where government has nearly socialized the medical system in America — think Obamacare; think Medicare and Medicaid; think tax dollars for health-based subsidies, etc. That means it’s fair game for this White House to tinker back and pressure Big Pharma to lower costs, despite Big Pharma’s stated concerns about research and development.
If pharmaceuticals truly can’t afford to reduce drug costs for Americans, and if they truly fear Trump’s demands will hamper their efforts to develop new, life-saving medical treatments, they’ll start making cuts in areas that have little to do with R&D — like lobbying, particularly when they’re lobbying against the interests of the American consumer.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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