President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a deal with drugmaker Regeneron to lower the cost of its pharmaceutical products as part of the White House’s signature drug pricing initiative.
The deal involves Regeneron lowering the prices of all its current and future drugs on Medicaid, according to Trump. It also involves selling a cholesterol drug called Praluent for $225 on the White House’s discounted drug website TrumpRx, according to the agreement first outlined by NOTUS and confirmed in a White House fact sheet.
The deal comes as the Trump administration has been touting efforts to provide economic relief ahead of November’s midterm elections, with Americans saying high costs for health care, gas, groceries and other basic needs are straining their budgets.
It’s one of many so-called most-favored-nation deals the Trump administration has made with drug companies to bring U.S. pharmaceutical prices to the same level as other developed nations. Last July, Trump publicly sent letters to executives at 17 major pharmaceutical companies about the issue. Regeneron is the final one of those companies to strike a deal with his administration.
Speaking at the White House on Thursday to announce the deal, Trump touted the discounts on drugs and said, “It should be front page news.” He said voters in this November’s midterm elections should reward his party because of the agreements with drugmakers.
“We should win the midterms, but it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately,” Trump said.
Trump also has a notable history with the drugmaker.
During his first term in 2020, when he was hospitalized with COVID-19, he was given a dose of a drug that Regeneron was testing to supply antibodies in order to help his immune system.
After he was released, Trump posted a video of himself standing outside the White House in which he repeatedly lavished praise on Regeneron.
As part of the new deal, Regeneron has also committed to spending $27 billion in research, development and manufacturing in the U.S., according to the White House fact sheet. Trump’s deals have historically offered companies relief from his tariffs if they make such commitments.
Regeneron also announced Thursday that Otarmeni, its new gene therapy for a rare form of congenital hearing loss, had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and would be made available to clinically eligible individuals in the U.S. at no charge. The therapy received expedited approval from the FDA under the agency’s so-called Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program.
The program, which was not authorized by Congress, has been under scrutiny from Democrats in Congress for months. House and Senate lawmakers have noted that FDA vouchers have repeatedly gone to companies that agree to pricing concessions sought by the White House.
Even as Trump and his Department of Health and Human Services have touted his drug-pricing deals as transformative, the details of the agreements have so far not been made public.
Pressed by members of Congress to share the contracts this week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said his team would share whatever details it could that didn’t include proprietary information or trade secrets. Trump and Kennedy have urged Congress to codify the deals into law.
The deals have occasionally run into roadblocks. A centerpiece of the agreements with weight-loss drugmakers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk fell apart earlier this week when Medicare delayed implementation of a program for insurers to cover the GLP-1 drugs.
Drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on a number of factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost.
Patients on Medicaid, the state and federally funded program for people with low incomes, already pay a nominal co-payment of a few dollars to fill their prescriptions, but lower prices could help state budgets that fund the programs.
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Associated Press writers Matthew Perrone and Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
