Back in May, popular vote loser Donald Trump made a promise on drug prices that "we're going to have some of the big drug companies, in two weeks, they're going to announce because of what we did, they're going to announce voluntary massive drops in prices." That didn't happen in two weeks' time. However, what did happen last week was that Pfizer hiked prices on dozens of drugs, the second big price hike this year. Some of the drugs included their best-sellers like Viagra and Lyrica, but also cancer medications.
And then this happened:
And it got good headlines, like "Pfizer will roll back drug prices after discussion with Trump." Except that's not what happened here. Not at all. They're not rolling back the price hike, they're merely postponing it.
"The company will return these prices to their pre-July 1 levels as soon as technically possible," the company's statement said. "The prices will remain in effect until the earlier of when the president's blueprint goes into effect or the end of the year—whichever is sooner."
In the wake of the announcement, Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines Program at the advocacy group Public Citizen, said: "Pfizer's alleged concession to Trump is a sham. Pfizer is only deferring price increases—not canceling them, and certainly not lowering its prices."
This is either Pfizer playing along with Trump, giving him a "win" to tout, or Pfizer punking a completely gullible ignoramus into thinking he won. It could go either way because it's Trump. But don't miss this part that Michael Hiltzik points out in the article, the ultimatum to Trump: give us this "blueprint" you've been promising by January 1 or we go back to the price hikes we just showed you. Pfizer and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry aren't too afraid of this blueprint, which the administration announced was coming back in May, because it doesn't have a lot in the way of teeth. Neither is the stock market: "Pfizer has gained 4.2% over the intervening two months and Merck is up by 7.5%. Gilead, the maker of hepatitis C drugs that can cost more than $80,000 per treatment and therefore might be ripe for a price cut, is up 17.2%." No one is expecting Trump's drug price reduction plan to eat into industry profits at all.
As with every "deal" that Trump makes and touts with private industry, this is so much kabuki. He leans on a company publicly, they pretend to react, he tweets out "I WON" and then the next week the company announces that they're going to do what they were going to do before his interference, anyway. He ignores that part. Rinse and repeat.