Over the 12 months ending in July, prescription drug prices saw their biggest annual drop in more than 60 years, according to inflation data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Wednesday. <\/p>\n
While consumer prices overall rose 3.4% year over year, the price of medicinal drugs \u2014 a category that includes all prescription and over-the-counter medications \u2014 fell by 2.7%, reportedly the largest such drop on record. Prescription drug prices fell by even more, down 3.1% compared with July 2025. That’s the largest annual decline since March 1963, The Washington Post reports<\/a>. <\/p>\n The White House sought to take credit for the news, arguing that President Trump’s push to lower drug prices was working. <\/p>\n “From his Most-Favored-Nations deals to launching TrumpRx, President Trump is delivering real results,” White House spokesman Kush Desai posted on X. “American patients are winning.” <\/p>\n That’s a potentially potent message with the November midterms looming and affordability concerns at the top of voters’ minds. Yet experts reportedly point to a range of factors, including lower prices for popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, more generics and a policy enacted under the Biden administration enabling Medicare to negotiate some prices with drugmakers. <\/p>\n “While the results are stark, teasing out the cause is complicated, independent experts said,” The Post’s Steve Thompson, Federica Cocco and Christopher Rowland noted.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Richard Frank, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor emeritus of health economics at Harvard University, told The Post that the Biden-era introduction of Medicare price negotiations, enacted as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is more likely behind the drop in drug prices.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Negotiated Medicare prices for the first set of 10 popular prescription drugs went into effect on January 1, 2026, and negotiated prices for another group of 15 drugs, including the popular diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, are set to take effect in 2027. <\/p>\n “If I was a betting guy on what mattered most, it would be probably stuff around the Inflation Reduction Act,” Frank told The Post. <\/p>\n