The first action will save American seniors billions of dollars by preventing middlemen — the famous middlemen, they call them — from ripping off Medicare patients with high prescription prices.
Currently, drug companies provide large discounts on the price of prescription medicines, including nearly $40 billion in rebates to Medicare Part D plans last year alone. Yet often, middlemen stop those discounts from going to the patients — which is what we’re interested in; not the middlemen — who need it the most. So the patients are going to be now getting the benefit, instead of these very wealthy individuals.
Patients pay very high prices, and they have for many years — although we brought it down; first time in 51 years — with the costs adding up to hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year, per patient.
Today’s action ends this injustice and requires that these discounts go directly to the people. These are the people that need it. This will save patients up to 30 percent. It could be 40 percent, could be 50 percent, could be much higher than that. These are numbers that nobody has ever even contemplated, and that doesn’t include lifesaving drugs like insulin, which will be even higher. Insulin was destroying lives and destroying families because the cost was so high, and now it’s at a level that nobody can even believe.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-delivering-lower-prescription-drug-prices-americans/