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Former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both eager to take on high drug prices, leaving pharmaceutical companies on the defensive as they spend millions of dollars this election season.
When Harris was California’s attorney general, she joined cases that resulted in almost $7.2 billion (about $22 per person in the United States) in fines for drug companies. In that role, she was an aggressive regulator of the drug industry. In her current position, she cast the tiebreaking Senate vote in 2022 for legislation that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices for its more than 60 million beneficiaries.
As president, Trump also was willing to challenge GOP orthodoxy by taking action to combat high drug costs. His administration sought to lower the prices Medicare pays for drugs through a proposal that the PwC Health Research Institute estimated would cost five drugmakers as much as $500 million a year. What was known as the “most favored nation” interim final rule was blocked because of legal challenges and rescinded by the Biden administration.
In addition, Trump issued a rule setting up a path to import drugs from Canada and other countries, with Florida this year becoming the first state to get federal approval to do so.
If elected, the Harris-Walz ticket appears more likely to be successful on drug pricing than Trump, whose policies were more disjointed, said Sergio Jose Gutierrez, a political strategist who has worked primarily with Democrats.
“His efforts were largely fragmented and faced resistance from both the industry and lawmakers,” Gutierrez said.For example, he said Trump promoted the executive order on international prices to tie certain Medicare drug costs to their prices overseas. But the final rule spurred four industry lawsuits and never went into effect.
The Biden administration successfully implemented a strategy of negotiating prices for top-selling Medicare drugs, even as lawsuits have been filed to stop the program.
Another shift in the pharmaceutical industry is emerging in its political contributions. An industry that gave three or four times as much to GOP candidates as to Democrats in the 1990s and early 2000s is now hedging its bets. So far in the 2024 cycle, drug companies have given $4.89 million to Democrats and $4.35 million to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan research group.
Harris has received $518,571 from the industry, and Trump has received $204,748.
Catherine Hill, a spokeswoman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, said the industry trade group looks forward to collaborating with any future presidential administration.
She criticized the Biden administration’s plan for Medicare price negotiation and Trump’s plan to align U.S. prices with those in foreign countries. Last month, the Biden administration announced new, reduced prices for 10 drugs in the program following negotiations between the federal government and drugmakers. The lower costs take effect in 2026.
“Previous price controls adopted by the Biden administration threaten to stifle that innovation,” Hill said. “Undermining intellectual property protections and borrowing other countries’ price controls will further undercut innovation and threaten patients’ access to medicine.”
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