Michael Kinnucan wrote (on FB at least):
Among all the other news this week you may have missed the news that Trump has gotten Pfizer and some other big drug companies to lower drug prices for Americans. If you did miss it, don’t worry, because it is fake as hell, the latest chapter in a long history (stretching back to 2017) of Trump attempting or pretending to lower drug prices and being too stupid or corrupt to actually get it done. It’s barely worth explaining why this is fake (all you really need to know is that Pfizer’s stock went up to its highest point this year when the deal was announced), but briefly:
Trump’s deals are doing two things: (1) Requiring drug companies to sell drugs directly to consumers through a website called (sigh) TrumpRX at deeply discounted prices, and (2) requiring drug companies to sell to state Medicaid programs at a “most favored nation” price (the lowest price they offer in other markets). These two things are fake as hell because:
The TrumpRX thing will only be available to you if you don’t use insurance and pay the whole cost of the drug out of pocket. Sadly for you, even if the drug is deeply discounted, paying for it out of pocket is still very expensive, and you won’t do it. Instead you’ll use insurance, duh, that’s why you have it, and the drug will cost the same (and your insurance will be just as expensive) as always. Additionally, if you happen to be uninsured then the drug companies already have discount programs for you so this won’t be different from what already happens.
The Medicaid thing is fake because Medicaid, Our Nation’s Best Healthcare Program, already gets deeply discounted drug prices and it’s not clear that the new prices will be lower at all (probably not, because Pfizer’s stock went up).
This is mostly unremarkable (Trump lies constantly), but I want to make two observations:
“Americans pay too much for drug prices” is possibly the least complex policy problem in human history. The thing with pharmaceuticals is that they’re life-saving, so you can’t not buy them, but the government awards decades-long patent monopolies to for-profit companies for them, so the drug companies can charge whatever they want, and it turns out what they want is to charge a lot. It is literally that simple. If you want drugs to cost less then there is exactly one (1) thing you can do to effectuate that, which is to set limits on the prices for the drugs. Specifically you need to do what every other developed country does: Put together a little panel that takes a look at each drug as it comes on the market and says “hm this is a pretty cool new drug you can charge 8/pill for it,” or whatever the case may be. Some may say “well you say it’s simple but if we lowered drug prices then drug companies wouldn’t do as much life-saving R&D” (i.e. the complicated thing about solving high drug prices is that high drug prices are good actually), but I submit to you that if you feel that high drug prices are good you should convene the panel I mentioned earlier and then multiply all its numbers by 2, rather than incentivizing research through a messy bounty program involving lots of TV commercials and funded by the copays of cancer patients. But that’s all to one side—some people think (Pfizer thinks) high drug prices are good, but if you think high drug prices are bad then there is a clear unambiguous policy solution to that, universally adopted outside the US, and we should just do it. So every time Trump announces something that is not “a panel will set the prices” you can tell it’s fake.
Every time Trump does something on drug prices besides the Only Thing That Would Work to fix drug prices, I feel a little wave of relief, to be honest? Trump has been talking about this issue for a decade because he has good political instincts here: the situation with drug prices is that Americans pay three times what the rest of the world pays for drugs, Americans are aware that they’re getting fucked and hate drug companies, it would be completely straightforward to fully fix this problem if the political will existed to do so, but the US government hasn’t done so because drug companies have purchased a stable bipartisan majority in Congress. It’s one of those healthcare issues where the US really stands out as having a uniquely bad political system that systematically serves elites at the expense of the popular will. So, if you wanted to cement your status as a strongman who stands above special interests and gets stuff done for the little guy by draining the swamp, this would be the place to do it. And Trump knows that, that’s why his addled mind keeps returning to the issue. But he’s too… Stupid? Corrupt? Unserious? Easily flattered and manipulated? Sensitive to CNBC graphs? Easily bribed? To actually get it done, and so there’s been this years-long parade of fakery, proud press releases and pretend executive orders that do nothing. And so now Pfizer has given him a cute little website with his name on it, he feels great, art of the deal baby, and Pfizer’s happy too—its stock is up.
There are real limits to how far even a smart, savvy version of Trump could take his “populism”—he’s fundamentally a rich guy who loves tax cuts and hates working people, so he can’t actually solve people’s problems—but there are these issues like drug prices where, you know, you wouldn’t have to go very far to out-populist the Democrats on the issue of “should Pfizer be allowed to price-gouge cancer patients,” and it wouldn’t take many things like that to get his approval rating into positive territory. The fact that he hasn’t is just a piece of good luck for us.
This is very, very good. One detail: This new “TrumpRX” gimmick mirrors “Obamacare,” of course, because much of what Trump does — including running for president semis-seriously, as opposed to jerking off in public — is fueled by his virulent rage that a Black man made fun of him and told him what to do. As you surely know, “Obamacare” was coined by GOP operative to mock the ACA, then everyone adopted it — Dems / libs / lefts very much included, both out of chronically mediated laziness and, I suspect, as a dig. Two things: (1) Now it’s kinda hard to argue that Trump & Co shouldn’t call his gimmick “TrumpRX,” isn’t it? I’m not pointing fingers at anyone, but I do want to point out that it’s an unusually crisp example of the the kind of “hypocrisy” that whiny-bitch rightists are constantly moaning about, and that Trump has a feral, predatory talent for exploiting. But, far more important, (2) I think many of you will be able to see how this kind of problem — which is more like a dysfunctional family than politics — serves as a cog in the Democrats’ systemic inability to (I’ll be be blunt) tell the truth about Trump.