DRUGS/HHS/MEDICARE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump said Friday [7-5-19] that the White House was writing an executive order to require pharmaceutical companies to offer the United States government among the lowest prices in the world, in comments that were not immediately clear to many experts on the country’s health care system…The White House has made the high costs of prescription drugs a policy priority, and the Department of Health and Human Services has proposed a series of measures meant to help address that. But until today there had been no public mention of a broad executive order. The administration is working on a plan that would use an index of international drug prices to set the price that Medicare pays for some drugs that are administered by doctors, such as cancer treatments. Last year, Mr. Trump used the phrase ‘favored-nation clauses’ to describe that proposal, which would base the Medicare price on prices from more than a dozen countries, including Canada, Britain, Japan and Slovakia.”
–Margot Sanger-Katz, “Trump Suggests Executive Order on Drug Prices, With a Scope That Is Unclear,” The New York Times online, July 5, 2019