Did Trump rescind lower drug prices? Explained

Donald Trump neither lies about everything nor always tells the truth — shocking, right? Sometimes he lies without remorse, other times he tells it how his myopic eyes see it, and other times still, he omits what he believes the public should remain ignorant about.

While one could hang on to the various outrageous points Trump made during his 2025 inaugural address — most reiterations of what had been said during his 2024 campaign — one should not neglect to note what the current president did not say. As Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argued, Trump did not utter a word about the American healthcare crisis, the exorbitant prices of prescription medicine, or the growing gap in income inequality.

Pharmaceutical companies and their lobbying efforts have meant that Americans have consistently paid more for certain essential medicine prescriptions than virtually any other nation. For those who believed the re-elected president would become the do-no-wrong champion of the working class during his second term, well, I’m sorry to say I might have some bad news.

A middle finger to Biden, Democrats, and working-class Americans

For those who still live in the fantasy that billionaire Donald Trump, who sees everything as a business opportunity, would be the one to go against the egotistical profit-driven wishes of other billionaires, one needs only look at the complete tech mogul committee sitting behind him during his Jan. 20 inauguration ceremony.

As Larry Levitt, the Executive Vice President for health policy, who oversees KFF’s “policy work on Medicare, Medicaid, the health care marketplace, the Affordable Care Act, racial equity, women’s health, and global health,” mentions in the X post above, even though Trump rescinded Biden’s Executive Order 14087, “Lowering Prescription Drug Costs for Americans,” it is not yet known what the 47th president will do about the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed during his presidency. This Act would allow Medicare to proactively negotiate consumer-friendly changes with drugmakers. In his final week in office, President Biden tried to assure that 15 drug prices would be lowered in 2025, with changes to be officially enacted in 2027.

On Jan. 21, Bloomberg Law reported how Democratic lawmakers addressed Trump’s probable inclination to yield to the desires of pharmaceutical companies, saying in a letter that “there was no legal basis for any pause” in the negotiations, and making clear how allowing these corporations to “pressure [Trump] into one would dramatically increase costs for over 60 million Medicare beneficiaries and betray [his] own campaign promises.”

On the side of the drug manufacturers, they have argued that lowered prices “deplete them of incentives to develop new medicines,” which should further highlight how intrinsically broken the system is when capital and profit margins take precedence over any humanitarian motivation or consideration of human rights.

It might well be that Trump won’t lose any sleep about going back on his word on one or two of his campaign promises. Moreover, his hypocrisy is partly hidden by the downpour of executive orders he issued on day one, including some that directly reflected assurances given on the campaign trail.

David Dayen from The American Prospect argued that Trump “put forward international price indexing and price transparency at hospitals as ideas in his first term, neither of which were fully implemented. But that’s the point; they weren’t implemented. Trump only has to follow the law his predecessor teed up for him to reap popular benefits from lower drug prices. But favoring billionaire companies has often taken precedence.”

At this time and especially after recent months, there should no longer be any doubts that corporations systemically have more rights and privileges than flesh and blood human beings, even more so if these are human beings without wealth or status. As Noam Chomsky wrote (2016), corporations are “a new category of persons with rights” “thanks to their scale, their immortality, and the protections of limited liability. The rights of corporations by now far transcend those of mere humans.”

Once we realize Sen. Sanders has sounded like a broken (but consistent) record for much of his life, it’s hard to view any Promethean conception of progress as more than a myth.