Drugmakers Brace for Trump's Proposals on U.S. Medicine Prices

Novartis AG Chief Executive Officer Joe Jimenez said he expects President Donald Trump’s administration to outline proposals to lower the burden of drug prices on patients within three months.

Drugmakers have met with White House officials in recent weeks to offer their own ideas, including ways of removing barriers to drug-price contracts based on the results that medicines deliver for patients, Jimenez told investors in Boston on Wednesday. It’s likely there could be “some sort of executive action” linked to controlling the cost of medicines, Allergan Plc’s CEO Brent Saunders said on Tuesday.

Trump has repeatedly excoriated pharmaceutical companies for high drug costs, but the policy and spending plans in his administration’s 2018 health budget contain almost no major proposals that would impact the industry’s pricing practices. He had said drugmakers were “getting away with murder” and that he’d have the U.S. government make the industry bid for government business, a dramatic proposition to cut prices that sent biotechnology and drug stocks spiraling downward on more than one occasion.

Novartis expects “to have a solution that will preserve the business model of how we innovate and discover and develop and launch into the U.S., as opposed to some of the bigger and more draconian elements that were discussed earlier,” the CEO of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant said.