LONDON, Jan 13 (APM) - This week's attack by Donald Trump against drug prices is embracing a health issue with broad public support, it is being reported.
The president-elect sent pharma share prices tumbling in the U.S. on Wednesday and in Europe on Thursday when he said his administration would negotiate lower prices from companies that were "getting away with murder" in sales to public health programmes. (APMMA 51284)
The Financial Times is reporting that with this vow to bargain with pharmaceutical companies for cheaper drugs, Trump is embracing a health issue with broad public support "just as more divisive efforts to repeal Obamacare become bogged down in Congress".
It said the comments came as efforts to fulfil his pledge to repeal President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms are running into trouble on Capitol Hill, where disagreement is growing among Republicans over how and when to replace the current system.
Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, remains a polarising issue: 45% of Americans have an unfavourable opinion of the reforms while 43% say they view them favourably, according to Kaiser Family Foundation polling, the FT said.
"For a president-elect barely a week away from his inauguration, reining in drug prices is a goal that a broad cross-section of Americans can agree on. His former rival Hillary Clinton made it a centrepiece of her campaign," it added.
It quoted Robert Blendon, a Harvard health professor who has done extensive polling on public opinion, as saying: "The only new major healthcare issue that we can find in America that is bipartisan is concern about drug prices."
"It is a separate issue from the Affordable Care Act. There is a very core difference in belief between people who voted for Donald Trump and people who voted for Hillary Clinton on the value and morality of keeping the ACA."
Following controversy over the soaring price of a Turing Pharmaceuticals' AIDS drug and Mylan's EpiPen, a Harvard-Politico survey last September found that Democrats and Republicans alike said drug companies bore much of the blame for rising healthcare costs.
Seventy per cent of those surveyed pointed a finger at drugmakers, with 60% blaming insurance companies and 53% citing the federal government.
"Pharma, pharma has a lot of lobbies and a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power and there's very little bidding on drugs," Mr Trump said. "We're the largest buyer of drugs in the world and yet we don't bid properly and we're going to start bidding and we're going to save billions of dollars."
Trump appeared to be referring to the U.S. government's huge potential clout as a drug buyer via the multibillion-dollar Medicare health programme for the elderly.
A 2003 law supported by the drugs industry and Republicans banned Medicare from negotiating directly with companies to set prescription prices. One way to curb prices would be for Congress to revisit that law, the FT said.
The Trump team has offered little detail on what he plans to do, adding to the anxiety in an industry that sees government negotiation as a slippery slope towards price controls that would stifle the innovation that leads to new treatments, it added.
Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to Trump, told Bloomberg on Thursday it would be irresponsible to repeal and replace Obamacare without having a "conversation" about drug pricing. "We hear from people daily that they feel crushed by the costs of the drugs that they need."
Hours earlier the U.S. Senate took a step towards repealing the Affordable Care Act by passing a budget measure instructing lawmakers to prepare legislation to repeal one of Obama's signature achievements, the FT said.
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