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January 07, 2019 at 08:04 PM
Just as the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest conference of the year is set to get under way, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain that drugmakers aren’t “living up to their commitments on pricing.”
Despite talk about halting increases and lowering the price on some treatments, pharmaceutical companies on Jan. 1 returned to the practice of regular price hikes on hundreds of drugs. The average increase was 6.7 percent, according to data analyzed by Bloomberg.
(Related: CMS to Drug Makers: Put Your Prices in TV Drug Ads)
Trump’s tweet also said drugmakers were “not being fair to the consumer, or to our Country!”
It was unclear if there was an immediate trigger for Trump’s comment on a day in which the president was mostly consumed with messages about the partial federal government shutdown and his demand for funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The comment was also an awkward contrast to one Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar wrote on Jan. 2, praising Trump’s leadership as the reason the pharma industry had announced “smaller and fewer drug price increases.”
