Trump to announce new deals to lower drug prices, White House says

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office as he signs an executive order, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office as he signs an executive order, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Thursday. (Evelyn Hockstein, Reuters)


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KEY TAKEAWAYS
  • Trump to announce drug price reduction deals Friday at the White House.
  • AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences and Merck expected to participate.
  • Five companies, including Pfizer and Eli Lilly, have already struck price deals.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is expected to announce on ​Friday new agreements aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, the White House said.

The announcement is scheduled for 11 a.m. MST at the White House.

AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, ⁠Gilead Sciences, and Merck are among major drugmakers expected to announce deals to cut prices on some medicines, according ‌to sources familiar with the matter.

Swiss drugmakers Novartis and Roche are also expected to participate, ⁠Bloomberg News reported earlier this week. Reuters previously reported that AbbVie was among the ‌companies involved.

In July, Trump sent ‍letters to leaders of 17 major pharmaceutical companies, outlining how they should ⁠provide so-called most-favored-nation prices to the U.S. government's Medicaid ⁠health program for low-income people, and guarantee that new drugs will not be launched at prices above those in other high-income countries.

So far five companies have struck deals with the administration to rein in prices. They are Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and EMD Serono, the U.S. division of Germany's Merck KGaA.

The remaining 12 are Sanofi, Regeneron, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, Amgen, Gilead, Boehringer Ingelheim, ‍Bristol Myers, GSK, Novartis, and Genentech, Roche's U.S. unit.

Bristol Myers, Gilead and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. AbbVie and Merck declined to comment.

Novartis has said it is in discussions with the Trump administration and is committed to finding solutions that lower costs for Americans. Roche said it supported Trump's goal of reducing the cost of drugs and encouraged other countries to reward biopharmaceutical innovation.

Trump has ‌long focused on the disparity between drug prices in the U.S. and other wealthy countries, which have government-run health systems that ‌negotiate price discounts.

The specter of tighter price controls by the U.S. government initially spooked investors, but terms of the deals announced so far calmed many of those fears.

Analysts have noted that Medicaid, which accounts for only around 10% of U.S. drug spending, already benefits from substantial price discounts, exceeding ⁠80% in some cases.

Pfizer, which ​announced its 2026 financial outlook on Tuesday, said ⁠the Medicaid discounts would result ‌in price and margin compression next year.

Contributing: Deena Beasley

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The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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