{"id":382935,"date":"2026-04-16T19:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/382935\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T19:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T19:02:08","slug":"drugmakers-raised-prices-on-hundreds-of-drugs-despite-trump-deals-senate-democrats-report-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/382935\/","title":{"rendered":"Drugmakers raised prices on hundreds of drugs despite Trump deals, Senate Democrats report finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said his deals<\/a> with drugmakers would bring down prescription drug prices in the U.S. But a report released by Senate Democrats finds prices have continued to climb \u2014 in some cases, sharply.<\/p>\n

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The report \u2014 released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, ahead of a hearing focused on drug prices \u2014 found that companies that signed drug pricing deals with Trump<\/a> have raised the cost of hundreds of medications and launched new ones at an average price of $353,000 a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmerican people continue to pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and that was true before President Trump was president. In most cases, it is even more accurate today,” Sanders said at the hearing. <\/p>\n

The price hikes include expensive gene therapies, cancer medications and multiple sclerosis drugs.<\/p>\n

The report also said the companies that signed deals with Trump have made huge profits during his second term in office. In 2025, the companies made a combined $177 billion in profits, up from $107 billion the year before.<\/p>\n

It comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to testify Thursday in back-to-back hearings on Trump\u2019s budget, first before the House Ways and Means Committee and later before the House Appropriations health panel. He is likely to face questions on Trump\u2019s priorities, including lowering prescription drug costs.<\/p>\n

The findings raise questions about whether the administration\u2019s \u201cmost favored nation\u201d deals<\/a> \u2014 which Trump said would lower U.S. drug prices to match those in other wealthy countries where drugs are often far less expensive \u2014 are having a meaningful impact on patients. The deals with the drugmakers were publicized by the White House, but details remain scant. It\u2019s unclear whether the drugs mentioned in the new report were a part of the deals, though all of the drugmakers included were. <\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the more frustrating aspects of recent drug pricing announcements has been the lack of transparency into the so-called deals that are being made by the administration,\u201d said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. \u201cIn fact, once you dig into the details, it appears that the administration\u2019s efforts to date have mostly served to help drug companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Sanders\u2019 report \u201cfixates on prescription drug list prices, which are meaningless because they do not reflect the actual purchase prices that patients pay at the pharmacy counter.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a part of the deals, drugmakers agreed to offer some of their products for a discounted price for people paying with cash, not insurance, on TrumpRx.gov, a discount prescription drug platform. Many of the discounts are the same as those found on GoodRx, another discount site. <\/p>\n

These discounts are separate from the list prices. And while people rarely pay the list price for a drug, a higher list price means drugmakers can charge insurance more. <\/p>\n

The new report pointed to several blockbuster drugs that saw list price hikes even as companies were negotiating or signing deals with Trump. <\/p>\n

For example, the list price of Keytruda, a widely used cancer treatment made by Merck, rose by 6% to about $210,000 a year in the U.S., far higher than prices in countries like Japan ($37,900) and France ($88,100), according to the report.<\/p>\n

Novartis\u2019 Kesimpta, a multiple sclerosis drug, increased by nearly $10,500 to $141,000 a year, according to the report. The annual price of Kesimpta in Germany is $17,300 and the yearly price in Canada is $23,500.<\/p>\n

The annual list price of Opdivo, Bristol Myers Squibb\u2019s immunotherapy, rose 4% to $260,000, more than double the price in other countries, including France ($90,300) and the United Kingdom ($113,000). <\/p>\n

Merck, Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Antonio Ciaccia, the CEO of 46brooklyn, a nonprofit group that tracks drug pricing in the U.S., said it\u2019s been clear that the companies that signed deals with Trump did not agree to lower prices across their entire portfolio.<\/p>\n

For many of the drugs not included in the deals, it\u2019s been \u201cbusiness as usual and this year is no different,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added that while average brand-name list prices declined in 2026 for the first time, that shift was largely driven by policies from the Biden administration, including Medicare drug pricing negotiations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The report also found that companies that negotiated deals with Trump launched new medications, many of them cancer drugs, with six- to seven-digit price tags.<\/p>\n

According to the report, Johnson & Johnson\u2019s cancer drug Inlexzo launched at a price of about $1 million; AbbVie\u2019s cancer drug Emrelis is about $719,000; and AstraZeneca\u2019s Datroway is about $419,000. <\/p>\n

Novartis\u2019 Itvisma, a one-time gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, has a list price of about $2.59 million. Another gene therapy from Novartis \u2014 Zolgensma, for spinal muscular atrophy<\/a> \u2014 increased by nearly $200,000 to more than $2.5 million for a single course of treatment, according to the report.<\/p>\n

Pfizer increased the price of its lung cancer drug Vizimpro by about 5% to about $208,000 a year, according to the report. <\/p>\n

Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment. AbbVie and AstraZeneca declined to comment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump has repeatedly said his deals with drugmakers would bring down prescription drug prices in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-382935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-medication","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}