WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it was setting most-favored-nation prescription drug pricing targets following an executive order by President Donald Trump.
The target price “is the lowest price in an OECD country with a GDP per capita of at least 60 percent of the U.S. GDP per capita,” the department said in a statement.
The agency said it expected “each manufacturer to commit to aligning US pricing” for all branded medicines that do not face competition from generics or biosimilar versions.
Trump signed a wide-reaching executive order last week directing drugmakers to lower the prices of their medicines to align with what other countries pay that analysts and legal experts said would be difficult to implement.
U.S. patients pay the highest prices for prescription drugs, often nearly three times more than those in other developed nations.
“We expect pharmaceutical manufacturers to fulfill their commitment to lower prices for American patients, or we will take action to ensure they do,” U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Caroline Humer, Rami Ayyub, Katharine Jackson and Bhanvi Satija; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Tomasz Janowski)
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