The TrumpRx medicine will prove worse than the disease

By Jeremy Nighohossian of CEI. Excerpt:

"Essentially, by committing to participate in TrumpRx, Pfizer and AstraZeneca have given in on pricing. In return, the president has committed to limit the tariffs imposed on their products and refrain from using the executive branch to go after their companies.

Judging only by immediate consequences, it seems like a win-win. The companies keep developing and selling drugs, even making some of them in the US, and start offering them at lower prices, and President Trump gets to celebrate a victory for Americans. What this happy outcome hides, though, are the incentives it creates for the future and the additional powers that corporations have just recognized.

Perhaps Trump will stop after this win. Given his history, that could go either way. The more concerning problem is what his successor will do with the knowledge that threatening companies works. Will the next president want to out-Trump Trump and actually extort companies for even further reduced drug prices, unilaterally shifting the industry to be lower profit and less innovative? Perhaps a future Democratic president will threaten to break up the drug companies unless they provide drugs to Medicare and Medicaid and the new public option at a loss.

If TrumpRx is a big success and more people buy their drugs through it, it will give the government even more leverage to compel drug companies to meet their policy demands. Drug research and manufacturing will need to be ESG-complaint, carbon-neutral, and DEI-adherent. Pills will need to be dyed to be more diverse and representative of America. And the pharmacies we know and who know us and our needs will be replaced by government bureaucracy.

Americans might be happy that Trump has jawboned his way to one positive outcome—a lower price, offered voluntarily with only minor downsides; and companies and their shareholders may be glad they dodged a bigger bullet. However, giving in to government threats for short-term relief paves the way for bigger demands and more pain in the long run."