Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says that his company and other large pharmaceutical firms are looking at working with the Trump administration to make more of their medicines available at lower costs to consumers.
In a conference call with investors on Tuesday to discuss second-quarter earnings, Bourla said, “We have serious discussions in the industry,” according to BioPharma Dive.
“I’m connected very often individually with all the major companies, and they are all ready to roll up their sleeves and execute something like that,” he added. Bourla leads Pfizer and is the board chair of PhRMA, the industry lobbying group.
Pfizer and its partner Bristol Myers Squibb recently revealed plans to make their blood thinner Eliquis available at a lower price online. The firm previously started a direct-to-consumer service that lets patients book telehealth appointments, schedule vaccinations, and fill some prescriptions.
“We think it is a fantastic way to go ahead, so we will work collaboratively to do it,” said Bourla.
Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, both makers of obesity drugs, have also put forward more ways that patients who pay in cash can access the weight-loss drugs directly. Other companies are also showing interest in the effort, looking at ways to make drugs available without pharmacy benefit managers — the middlemen getting rebates from drugmakers that insurers claim lower the overall cost, but not in ways that are clear to a patient filling a prescription.
In letters to 17 drugmakers last week, Trump demanded that direct-to-consumer options be expanded. He said he would use “every tool” available to him if the companies don’t act to lower the cost of their products to prices seen in other industrialized countries.
Trump has indicated that the policy would be limited to Medicaid, and analysts aren’t unified on how much of an impact it would have.
During the call on Tuesday, Bourla noted that he’s in “active discussions” with the “highest levels of the U.S. government,” according to BioPharma Dive. That includes speaking to Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz.
“The letter asks a lot from us,” said Bourla. “But we are engaged in productive discussion with them and in general, I’m happy with the way that they listen to us.”
Amid an investigation into pharmaceutical imports, the Commerce Department is expected to impose sector-specific tariffs. Trump told CNBC on Tuesday that his administration would at first put in place smaller tariffs on pharmaceuticals, which could subsequently rise to as much as 250 percent.
While the tariffs would be expensive for drugmakers, analysts think that a phase-in period would mean that many companies could change their supply chains to avoid the worst of the financial repercussions, BioPharma Dive noted. Most of the biggest drugmakers have already revealed significant investment in manufacturing in the U.S.
Pfizer indicated that it would be able to take on the tariffs this year, including any possible changes to its pricing, and still meet its financial forecast of revenues measuring between $61 billion and $64 billion.
Trump has made impossible promises on drug prices, saying he’s cut them by up to 1,500 percent.
“You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent. I don’t mean 50 percent, I mean 14 — 1,500 percent,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
This is inaccurate, as cutting prices by more than 100 percent would mean that consumers are being paid to take the drugs.
The director of health policy at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center, Geoffrey Joyce, called the claim “total fiction.”
Mariana Socal is an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University.
“I find it really difficult to translate those numbers into some actual estimates that patients would see at the pharmacy counter,” she said.
“It’s an objective fact that Americans are paying exponentially more for the same exact drugs as people in other developed countries pay, and it’s an objective fact that no other Administration has done more to rectify this unfair burden for the American people,” a White House spokesperson said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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