Watch Live: Trump Touts Drug-Price Deal

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Shares of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer sprinted higher in early trade Tuesday after reports that later today, President Trump and CEO Albert Bourla, will announce that the company will sell drugs at lower prices to the US Medicaid insurance program as part of a deal to advance the Trump administration’s “most favored nations” agenda. 

The program is an effort to link US drug prices to the lowest cost of drugs paid by the wealthiest countries – and is linked to a May executive order that laid out the initiative, WaPo reports. Administration officials have been in negotiations with big pharma to get them to voluntarily lower their prices, which had a Monday deadline. 

Bourla is also expected to announce a $70 billion investment on manufacturing medications in the USA, according to Pfizer spokeswoman Amy Rose and a White House official. 

“It’s a win for American patients, a win for American leadership, and it’s a win for Pfizer because it provides the certainty and stability we need to continue advancing new breakthrough medicines for patients,” Rose said in a statement.

The move coincides with a direct-to-consumer website for Americans to buy drugs, dubbed TrumpRX – which would allow people to pay cash for certain drugs directly from a government website at a discounted price negotiated by the government. 

“We pay much higher for drugs than the rest of the world. We subsidize the rest of the world,” Trump said last week. “We’re not doing that anymore and that’s a big thing.”

Trump has long argued that the United States government spends too much on medications and pursued a similar drug-pricing plan during his first term. His administration has sought to pressure the pharmaceutical industry through a mix of tariffs and new initiatives, such as several pilot programs being developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that could impose new drug-pricing controls in the Medicare program, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail those pilot programs. -WaPo

And according to the Wall Street Journal, other companies are expected to follow suit. 

“President Trump is leveraging the power of the federal government to drastically cut drug prices for everyday Americans,” said White House spokesman Kush Desai. “Democrats talked the talk for decades about drug prices, but only President Trump is actually walking the walk.”

The pharmaceutical industry has sought to make concessions – with their main lobbying group – the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America on Monday announcing a series of voluntary steps to support Trump’s goals. 

Developing…