Drug prices climb despite Trump promise, investigation finds
Source: NBC News
President Donald Trump made reducing drug prices a key promise during his election campaign, repeatedly accusing drugmakers of “getting away with murder.” At the end of May, he promised that drug companies would be announcing “massive” voluntary drug price cuts within two weeks.
That hasn’t happened, and an Associated Press analysis of brand-name prescription drug prices shows that it’s been business as usual for drugmakers, with far more price hikes than cuts. The number of increases slowed somewhat and were not quite as steep as in past years, the AP found.
Over the first seven months of the year, there were 96 price hikes for every price cut, the AP found. Health Secretary Alex Azar, the administration’s point man for efforts to lower drug prices, conceded in a recent AP interview that it will be a while before drug prices fall. He noted the complexity of the medicine market and its incentives for drugmakers to boost prices so they and middlemen make bigger profits.
Drugmakers typically say they need to keep raising the prices of existing drugs to pay for costly, lengthy research to develop new medicines, though industry critics dispute that.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/drug-prices-climb-despite-trump-promise-investigation-finds-n913011
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