As pharma companies face an imminent deadline from President Donald Trump related to his "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) drug pricing demands, the industry's top U.S. lobbying group is touting three "major actions" by its members and calling for some policy shifts of its own.
The timing of the Sept. 29 press release by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) coincides with the deadline set by the president when he laid out the steps pharma companies "must take" to align certain U.S. prices with lower prices overseas.
But rather than directly addressing the core component of Trump's demand, the PhRMA communication centers on its members' infrastructure spending, patient financial assistance programs and a new website designed to compile drugmakers' direct sales offerings.
PhRMA members are planning $500 billion in U.S. investments over the next 10 years, including $100 billion in projects that haven't been announced yet, PhRMA CEO Steve Ubl wrote in an accompanying Washington Post op-ed piece Monday.
Besides the capital projects, the industry trade group also plans to launch a website compiling its members' direct sales offerings. Over the last several months, Big Pharma players have been rolling out new direct-to-patient sales platforms that offer cash-paying patients steep discounts to list prices for certain medicines. This is one component of the president's push to rein in U.S. prices, and pharmaceutical companies are happy to stick it to middlemen in the U.S. whenever possible.
Back in July, Trump sent letters to 17 pharma CEOs directing them to "provide MFN prices to every single Medicaid patient" and to not charge more for new drugs in the U.S. than in other developed nations. He gave the companies until Sept. 29 to provide "binding commitments" on these priorities and others.
Since then, companies have shown a willingness to play ball with the administration's priorities. Eli Lilly, for one, implemented a steep price hike for Type 2 diabetes and obesity blockbuster Mounjaro in the U.K. at the start of this month, drawing local criticism.
More recently, Bristol Myers Squibb has said it plans a U.S.-level list price for schizophrenia medicine Cobenfy in the U.K., a first for the company, while AbbVie on Monday unveiled similar pricing plans for antibody-drug conjugate Elahere.
While list prices are publicly known in the U.K., pharma companies regularly negotiate confidential discounts that serve to enable patient access at acceptable costs to the government and others.
Meanwhile, the third "major action" highlighted by PhRMA in its Monday release is its members' financial assistance programs. A new survey found that PhRMA members help 10 million Americans with various financial assistance programs each year, according to the release.
Even as PhRMA's members work to respond to the administration's pricing demands, the lobbying organization has some policy asks of its own.
The group called on policymakers to require pharmacy benefit managers to share savings with patients and to "fix" the 340B hospital drug pricing program. The latter issue has drawn significant attention from PhRMA lately, as the trade group says the safety net drug pricing program has grown far beyond its intended scope.