Why is President Trump threatening Americans’ access to prescription medicine at the height of a global pandemic? As America’s scientists race to develop vaccines and effective treatments to COVID-19, the Trump administration threatens to reduce patients’ access to innovative treatments by pegging the price of some prescription medicine to those in countries that artificially lower the price of those treatments.
- Americans have access to more new treatments than patients in any other country in the world because our current system rewards innovation and, as a result, produces more new treatments than the rest of the world.
- Of all the new medicines launched since 2011, Americans have access to nearly 90 percent.
- By comparison, patients in France have access to just 50 percent of those new medicines, while patients in Canada and Switzerland have access to even fewer.
- Imposing artificial price caps like those used in other countries would dramatically reduce investment in the next wave of innovative treatments, resulting in fewer innovative treatments.
- President Trump’s own White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) predicted that the price controls he is threatening would result in as many as 100 fewer medicines over the next decade.
- This lack of innovation would cost our health system $1 trillion a year because of the diminished health outcomes.
- Foreign price caps would deal the biggest blow to smaller biotech firms, reducing their introduction of new medicines by 90 percent – or 56 fewer approvals over the next decade.
- American biopharmaceutical companies regularly invest more in research and development than most other industries, and it is one of the least profitable sectors of the economy, ranking 36th among all other U.S. industries.
- Just 35 public biopharmaceutical companies in the U.S. generate any profits selling branded prescription drugs – or less than 10 percent of all American biopharmaceutical companies.
- This increased access to innovative medicine results in better health outcomes for patients in the U.S.
- It would be a tragedy to risk this American innovation pipeline just to score political points ahead of the November election.