As President Donald Trump works to move sky-high U.S. drug prices closer to those in other developed countries, Eli Lilly seems willing to play ball.
In a published statement Thursday, Lilly said it supports the Trump administration's goal of strengthening biopharma R&D and manufacturing in the U.S. as well as "more fairly sharing the costs of breakthrough medical research across developed countries."
To support this endeavor, Lilly explained that the "prices for medicines paid by governments and health systems need to increase in other developed markets like Europe in order to make them lower in the US."
Lilly said it has "intensified efforts to align prices across developed countries" in recent months. The company, biopharma's largest by market cap, plans to roll out "necessary pricing adjustments" as part of this effort by Sept. 1, according to the statement. During this process, Lilly pledged to provide "continued access for patients."
Lilly's Thursday statement is light on details, but the company did point to an agreement with the U.K. government to increase the list price of Mounjaro there.
Lilly plans to raise the list price of the Type 2 diabetes and weight loss drug in the U.K. by as much as 170%, The Financial Times reports. The price hike doesn't apply to the National Health Service but rather private providers that can negotiate their own discounts, according to the newspaper.
Beyond the U.K., it's not clear how much Lilly plans to raise prices across Europe. On a conference call last week, Lilly CEO David Ricks said European governments are "not signing up to pay more for drugs."
Still, Ricks said it's in the biopharma industry's "long-term interest" to address pricing discrepancies that have "gotten more and more out of whack" during the CEO's career. In 2022, U.S. drug prices were on average 2.78 times higher than those in a group of 33 other countries, according to one analysis published last year.
"So I think here, the president's right to call that out," Ricks said last week. "The question is really how."
In the U.S., "structural issues" have played a role in raising drug prices, according to Lilly's Thursday statement. These include cross subsidies, the abuse of government programs and insurance cost-sharing by patients, Lilly said.
Seeking to address some of these hurdles, the company has introduced its LillyDirect program to offer certain medicines directly to cash-paying patients. Additionally, the company has moved to lower insulin list prices by 70% while capping patients' out-of-pocket costs for insulin.
Lilly's foreign pricing pledge comes two weeks after Trump sent letters to top pharma companies reiterating his demand that they match their U.S. prices with the lowest prices offered in other developed nations. In May, Trump penned an executive order on the "most favored nation" (MFN) pricing policy, but the president wasn't satisfied with the industry's response to the EO, prompting his recent batch of letters.
Besides the MFN discussions, the Trump administration has made repeated threats about pharma-specific tariffs, a policy Lilly said it opposes.
"Medicines have long been excluded from tariffs because of their life‑saving nature," Lilly said in its statement. "Broad tariffs would raise costs, limit patient access, and undermine American leadership, especially for companies already investing heavily in domestic manufacturing."