President Donald Trump on Thursday announced a drug pricing agreement with Regeneron, closing what the White House described as the final deal in a yearlong push to get major pharmaceutical companies to lower costs.
Regeneron is the last of 17 drugmakers targeted by the administration to reach such an accord. Under the agreement, the company will lower prices for its current and future medicines in Medicaid, offer its cholesterol drug Praluent at a set discounted price through a new federal platform for lower-cost prescriptions, and provide a newly approved gene therapy for a rare form of hearing loss free to eligible patients in the U.S. Trump also said the company has committed to investing billions of dollars in domestic manufacturing.
The deal is part of Trump’s Most Favored Nation initiative, which seeks to align U.S. drug prices with those paid in other developed countries. The White House has made lower prescription drug costs a central piece of its domestic agenda, and Thursday’s announcement was meant to show the administration had finished the job it set out to do over the past year.
But the reach of the discounts is narrower than the headline suggests. Some of the price cuts apply mainly to government programs such as Medicaid, and critics have questioned how much relief they will deliver for consumers who pay out of pocket. That leaves the central test of the agreement not in the announcement itself, but in whether patients outside those programs actually see cheaper prescriptions when they go looking for them.
For Trump, the Regeneron deal gives him a clean ending to a campaign he cast as a major advance in drug pricing. For patients, the important question now is simpler: how much of the promised lower-cost access will show up where they buy medicine.