US: Trump tells big pharma to ‘get prices down’

President Trump on Tuesday told a group of drug company executives gathered for a meeting at the White House that they need to “get prices down.”

“You folks have done a tremendous job but we have to get prices down,” Trump said, according to a pool report.

Trump has been a critic of high drug prices, and has endorsed measures like allowing Medicare to negotiate prices.

But the president also called for reducing regulations to allow for faster approvals of new drugs and to allow drug companies to bring jobs back to the US.

“We’re going to be cutting regulation at a level nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in the meeting with executives.

“You can’t get approval for the plant and then you can’t get approval to make the drug, other than that you’re doing fantastic,” he said.

Trump called drug prices “astronomical.”

“US drug companies have produced extraordinary results for our country, but the pricing has been astronomical for our country,” he said.

Still, he also offered to make the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of new drugs “much faster.”

Full Content: The Hill

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