The incoming Democratic chairs of the key health committees have taken a new step toward investigating the most-favored-nation drug pricing agreements between drugmakers and the Trump administration. STAT reported on November 10 that a new round of letters was recently sent to all 27 companies with such deals, according to a congressional source familiar with the letters. Bloomberg Law, reporting the same request sent on Monday, named the authors as Representatives Frank Pallone Jr., Richard Neal and Bobby Scott and Senator Ron Wyden, the likely health committee leaders in the next Congress, and said the letters demand unredacted agreements and any related documents, with a meeting demanded if companies do not comply.
The letters continue a campaign that began earlier this year, when the top Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee and the House Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, and Education and Labor committees first asked companies to disclose the details of deals that tie Medicaid drug prices to levels in peer countries. Under the agreements as publicly described, drugmakers voluntarily provide discounts to state Medicaid programmes and, in exchange, are exempt from mandatory Medicare price cuts and receive relief from pharmaceutical tariffs. The terms have remained mostly confidential, which is the core of the Democratic complaint: without the documents, neither Congress nor the public can verify the administration’s claims. The White House has said the 26 agreements cover roughly 90 percent of the branded drug market and will save 600 billion dollars over the next decade, figures Bloomberg Law attributes to the administration itself.
What changes now is leverage. Democrats won majorities in both chambers in the November 3 midterms and take control when the new session begins on January 3, bringing committee agendas, hearings and subpoena power. Wyden, set to chair Senate Finance, has said pricing oversight will be a priority, and Pallone has already asked the Government Accountability Office to review TrumpRx, the federal direct-to-consumer platform linked to the policy. The industry’s public position, voiced by Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla on the company’s recent earnings call, is that the deals will remain intact despite the oversight. The agreements also expire at the end of the president’s term, so the investigation is as much about whether the model survives codification as about what the current documents say.