I think 'MFN' is almost propaganda (not a term that existed before 2016-2020 administration) so let's leave that aside.
Are you claiming that the new website is offering lower prices than patients are paying after their co-pay? That is not the case outside the example I presented; moreover, the way the website is organized, there will be no pressure for prices to remain competitive after the initial media attention dies away.
I agree that a hypothetical case where we were paying lower prices would be better for us—but this remains an unrealized hypothetical. One way for us to pay lower prices would be to allow our government to negotiate prices for Medicare/Medicaid recipients, and that is exactly the thing that has been hampered.
Not arguing on broken internal pricing dynamics that are skewed by all sorts of gov programs and payors.
It’s about external, global pricing dynamics. The site clearly isn’t going to be able to give clean payor/pbm/gov subsidized pricing tables - that is almost an impossible exercise in our system.
What the agreement does accomplish is saying Americans will not pay $1150/mo while EU pays $400/mo while Argentina pays $120/mo.
It guarantees drugs will be greater than or equal to US pricing abroad which effectively forces pharma to find deeper profits outside of the US, or lower prices for all countries to acquire demand.
That is extremely effective. Now it’s up to a really complex group of people to figure out what that means inside our weird system of pharma/pbm/rebates/insurance/medicare.
But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?
> But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?
Correct
> What the agreement does [...]
This is hypothetical and does not exist. It also is not going to happen, politically, because drug companies are currently expecting to charge US prices in the US, while charging lower, non-US prices outside the US.
> That is extremely effective
This is hypothetical—and, as I've said, the attempt that the Inflation Reduction Act made toward this was watered down by an executive order. To be fair, the negotiation mechanism is still in place, and its existence must be influencing drug pricing already.
Drug companies produce drugs to make money. There is a huge investment. They maximize revenue by price discrimination to recover the cost of the good drug and all the drugs that didn't work. The US is a rich country. People in other countries can't pay as much for the drug. To maximize revenue the drug company sells the drug at a lower price to those people.
More generally, price controls lead to less supply. Drug price controls will result in fewer new drugs. Minimum wage laws result in no workers doing work that is worth less than minimum wage. Anti- price gouging laws result in less bottled water and fewer generators after a hurricane. The principle is universal despite promises of delightful state run grocery stores.
