President Trump has a genius dual strategy to bring down skyrocketing drug prices and bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States.
China’s control over big pharma is a huge risk to America’s health and sovereignty.
President Trump sounded the alarm again as he placed tariffs on China and called for pharmaceutical manufacturing to be brought back to America.
President Trump announced that “a major tariff on pharmaceuticals” would be announced shortly.
Millions of Americans are dependent on medicines taken daily that are made on the other side of the world in countries that could turn on the U.S. at any moment.
Domestic manufacturing of pharmaceuticals is only part of the battle to rein in Big Pharma. The next step is to take on the shadow cartel driving American drug prices into the stratosphere.
Americans are being ripped off by Pharmacy Benefit Managers, or PBMs, who have hijacked the entire system.
PBMs don't make a single pill. They don’t cure a single patient. They manipulate prices behind closed doors, marking up the cost of drugs in the U.S. by factors of 10, 100 and even 1000 percent of what they cost in other parts of the world.
PBMs skim billions in secret rebates while American families have to choose between groceries and their prescriptions.
PBMs are mysterious entities who claim to negotiate the best prices between big pharma and the health insurance companies so Americans can get the best deal on critical medicines. However, drug prices are skyrocketing and PBMs are pocketing hundreds of billions of dollars in the name of saving us money.
PBMs are a scam and they must be stopped as we simultaneously move pharma manufacturing back to our shores.
This isn’t just about industry. It’s about survival. It's about rescuing our system, protecting every mom, every veteran, every senior citizen who has been crushed by these invisible middlemen.
This issue is one of the very few in D.C. that is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans alike have been blasting PBM price gouging for years and we finally have the right leaders in the White House and the administration to tackle the problem.
President Trump has pledged to take on PBMs. He said in a recent press conference that he would “knock out the middleman” and called out PBMs for making bigger profits than the drug makers. It’s true.
President Trump’s HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made clear in recent testimony on capitol hill that PBMs are in the Trump admin’s crosshairs. Secretary Kennedy affirmed that he and President Trump want “to get the excess profits away from the PBMs and send it back to primary care, to patients in this country.”
Right now in the legacy media, the so-called experts are panicked over tariffs driving up the cost of pharmaceuticals.
Tariffs aren't the enemy — PBMs are. Tariffs are an effective tool to rebuild American manufacturing, but unless we break the PBM monopoly, Americans will keep paying the highest drug prices in the world — whether the medicine is made here or overseas.
PBMs make money at every step of the process. They pocket money from drug manufacturers, from pharmacies, from health insurance plans and no one knows how much is being skimmed off the top at each step by the PBMs.
President Trump took the first step on April 15th through an executive order directing the Labor Secretary to draw up regulations to force PBM price transparency.
There may have been a day when the PBM middlemen negotiated prices and saved consumers money, but those days are long gone. Health insurance companies have gobbled up the PBMs. They essentially negotiate with themselves and more money is skimmed off the top and the consumer is gouged.
The top PBMs are CVS Caremark (owned by CVS Health), Express Scripts (owned by Cigna), and OptumRx (owned by UnitedHealth Group). Together, they control around 79% of all U.S. prescription claims.
Their affiliated specialty pharmacies brought in massive revenue last year:
- CVS Specialty: $73.3 billion
- Express Scripts: $59.5 billion
- Optum Specialty Pharmacy: $32.3 billion
An FTC investigation showed they made $7.3 billion in revenue by marking up generic specialty drugs between 2017 and 2022 — and another $1.4 billion through spread pricing, charging more to plan sponsors than they reimbursed pharmacies.
We can no longer let Wall Street middlemen rob Main Street families. It’s time to return power to American workers, American pharmacies, and American patients — not the corporate cronies who rigged the system against us.
President Trump is seizing this moment to secure our drug manufacturing and bring it back to our shores, but the second phase to fixing the broken system is to break the PBMs.