I can’t wait to see how he and his team of apologists will spin this one.
The people who brought us the “unbelievable” accomplishments of Trump’s first 100 days will have to work pretty hard to find alternative facts to explain this.
Donald Trump got himself into office by promising all kinds of things to the voting public. He was going to build that wall. He was absolutely, positively going to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, stop ISIS in its tracks and bring back millions of jobs.
Sure he was.
In spite of his constant bragging about all he’s done so far, none of these promises have been kept.
So we shouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that Trump is also backing away from his promise to lower prescription drug costs.
After he met with pharmaceutical company CEOs, Trump stopped talking about how awful it is that Americans pay more for prescription drugs than people in any other country. He had once referred to drug prices as “astronomical” and demanded that the industry lower costs.
He had even threatened to negotiate directly with the industry to lower costs for Medicaid and Medicare.
But after his pow wow with the Big Pharma crowd, Trump changed his tune and went with the traditional, conservative approach to helping consumers.
All of a sudden, the idea of having the government negotiate prices for drugs is “price fixing” and it’s the worst thing in the world for helping to lower prices.
Now Trump says that he plans to lower costs by reducing taxes on the big drug companies, and eliminating those pesky safety regulations. He doesn’t want to do anything that will “hurt businesses” which really means that he doesn’t want to do anything to stifle the obscene profits made off of sick Americans.
Now he’s all about improving competition because that’s the conservative solution to rampant price gouging by any industry.
He said:
“I’ll oppose anything that makes it harder for smaller, younger companies to take the risk of bringing their product to a vibrantly competitive market. That includes price-fixing by the biggest dog in the market, Medicare, which is what’s happening. But we can increase competition and bidding wars, big time.
So what I want, we have to get lower prices, we have to get even better innovation and I want you to move your companies back into the United States. And I want you to manufacture in the United States. We’re going to be lowering taxes, we’re going to be getting rid of regulations that are unnecessary.”
Parse through the gibberish and there you are. Another promise broken. Another position that was taken just long enough to get some votes from gullible citizens. And then it’s back to a big business rich CEO supporting all the other big business rich CEOs.
I guess all those folks who were duped the promise of lower medical costs should have pulled the lever for Bernie instead.
Featured image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)
