President Trump Will Meet Pharma Execs at the White House on Tuesday

During Tuesday’s meeting and his campaign, Mr. Trump promised to slash regulations and get new treatments through the Food and Drug Administration approval process faster to help increase competition.

The meeting was the latest example of Trump’s strategy of personally pressuring companies to keep manufacturing jobs in the USA and to add more jobs in this country. “You can’t get approval for the plant, and you can’t get approval for the drug; other than that, you’re doing fantastic”, Trump said, according to the Times.

“We’re going to streamline the FDA”, Trump said.

The meeting was part of a series of meetings he has been holding with leaders of different sectors to get them to increase jobs and investment in the USA to further his campaign promises.

After taking office for less than two weeks, Trump has signed several executive orders and presidential memorandum to state his intent to cut regulations.

“The current system needs to evolve to enable the private sector to lead the move to a value-driven health care system”.

Though there’s still worrisome ambiguity on the subject, Trump appeared to back off the worst-case scenario for pharma companies – the US government won’t be setting drug prices.

“I want you to manufacture in the United States”, he told leaders of seven major pharmaceutical companies. Trump said today that too often, the FDA has been overly cautious in approving new drugs desperately needed by sick patients – sometimes resulting in unnecessary deaths. “Foreign price controls reduce the resources of American drug companies to finance drug and R&D innovation”. It’s not going to take 15 years.

Among those attending the meeting were the bosses of Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Amgen and the head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) lobbying group.

What’s more, the industry relies on strong FDA standards to help protect their profits, block rivals with lesser products and allow smaller companies the same chance to introduce drugs as larger firms.

Although Mylan CEO Heather Bresch is calling for more transparency from insurers, pharmacy benefits managers and drug companies about how they price their products, she doesn’t seem to feel shame about the EpiPen price increases, judging from her appearance Friday on CBS This Morning.

Trump, in his first press conference as president, lashed out at drugmakers, saying they had been “getting away with murder” because the federal government did not require them to compete for its business. “I’m still keeping an open mind”, said Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania, a Republican and an early congressional backer of Trump. “And there’s very little bidding on drugs”, he said.

“We’ve been advocating for a long time to speed up the approval of generics and remove the barriers to their approval”, Read said.

“You’ve got such purchasing power that’s not being utilized to the full extent”, Spicer said.