Trump struck deals with 16 drug companies. But they’re still raising prices this year

The price increases came in at a median of 4% — the same as last year — despite the deals announced with fanfare by the Trump administration.

Pharmaceutical list prices are the starting point for negotiations with insurers and the middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers. List prices play a role in which drugs insurers choose to cover and what the patient ultimately pays out of pocket at the pharmacy counter.

Asked about the price hikes and whether they break the terms of the deals, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the list prices aren’t important and that the specific discounts addressed in the deals are coming to state Medicaid programs and patients who want to pay cash for some prescriptions.

The White House announced Thursday that it was asking Congress to pass legislation to support its Great Healthcare Plan. During a press call, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, claimed the plan would “codify” what was in the individually negotiated drug company deals.

What we know about the deals

Details are hard to come by since the administration’s deal documents haven’t been made public.

During the press conferences, health and White House officials mentioned the companies had made commitments for Medicaid discounts — but that’s something the program already gets, says Dr. Ben Rome, a health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The deals also included pledges for future drugs to be launched at the same price in other wealthy countries as in the U.S. And some drugs will be made available at a discount to cash-paying customers — that is, those who are uninsured or not using their health insurance — through a new website called TrumpRx.gov.

But those efforts don’t affect prices for a lot of the companies’ products and most health care consumers and insurance plans.

“Those deals probably are not very important in terms of manufacturer drug pricing and the prices paid by most Americans for prescription drugs,” says Rome.

Pfizer, which reached the first deal with the Trump administration in September, raised the prices of 72 products in January, according to 46brooklyn. They include a 15% increase on the price of its COVID shot.

New York-based Pfizer says its new price increases were modest, and necessary to invest in new medicines and address added expenses. In an email to NPR, the company also pointed out that while list prices have gone up, the prices that insurance companies actually wind up paying Pfizer, after various discounts and rebates paid to middlemen and other programs, have gone down.

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Merck also raised prices on 18 products, including Isentress for HIV and Belsomra for insomnia, according to 46brooklyn’s data.

The New Jersey-based company said in an email that it made these decisions “responsibly to reflect a product’s clinical value to patients and the health care system.” Asked about how the price increases fit into its agreement with the administration, Merckspokesperson Julie Cunningham said the “exact terms” are “confidential,” but the company is working on “fairer global pricing.”

Some drug prices went down

There were 18 big price cuts in the first few days of the year, according to 46brooklyn. That includes four drugs that were part of the first round of Medicare drug price negotiation — an initiative launched by the Biden administration as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.