Trump Embraces International Reference Pricing in Executive Order

As we reported in a previous post, Donald Trump several weeks ago threatened drug manufacturers with the prospect of an Executive Order mandating international reference price limitations, unless the manufacturers put forward proposals to significantly reduce drug prices by August 24.  On Sunday, September 13, not having elicited the desired reaction from manufacturers, Trump issued the threatened Executive Order on Lowering Drug Prices by Putting America First.  The Order first directs the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to “immediately implement his rulemaking plan” to test a payment model under Medicare Part B, under which Medicare would pay no more than a “most favored nation price” for certain high-cost prescription drugs.   That price would be the lowest price for a drug that the manufacturer sells in a member country of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that has a comparable per-capita gross domestic product, adjusted for volume differences and differences in national gross domestic product.  There is no further explanation of how these adjustments should be made.  In directing the HHS Secretary to “implement his rulemaking plan,” the Order presumably was referring to an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) issued by HHS in November 2018 which proposed to implement an international reference pricing payment model under the auspices of the CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI).  See 42 U.S.C. § 1315a(b).  (Click here for our post on the ANPR.)  HHS has not taken any action on that ANPR to date.

In addition, the Order extends the international reference pricing concept to Medicare Part D, which was not contemplated in HHS’s earlier ANPR.  Therefore, the Order directs HHS to “develop and implement a rulemaking plan,” again under the auspices of CMMI as authorized in 42 U.S.C. 1315a(b), to limit Medicare payment to the most favored nation price for Part D drugs where insufficient competition exits and seniors are faced with prices above those in comparable OECD countries.  The CMMI model would test whether limiting prices to the most favored nation price would mitigate poor clinical outcomes and increased expenditures on drugs.

Ironically, both the Part B and Part D mandates of the Order rest on the authority of 42 U.S.C. 1315a(b) – which was enacted in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act.  In a case pending before the Supreme Court, the Trump Administration is seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act in its entirety on constitutional grounds.  See Brief for the Federal Respondents, State of California, et al. v. State of Texas, et al., Nos. 19-840 and 19-1019.  Oral argument is scheduled for November 10.  If the Administration prevails in that case, one of the more minor consequences will be the invalidation of this Executive Order.  In addition, a change of administration in January may result in the revocation of this Executive Order (among many others) and/or withdrawal of the mandated HHS proposed regulations, as often happens after a change in administration.  If final regulations are ever issued, there is a strong possibility of a legal challenge from the drug manufacturer industry, which is strenuously opposed to international reference pricing.

Despite these uncertainties, the significance of this Executive Order should not be minimized.  International reference pricing was proposed by the Obama Administration in 2016 (see our post here), was reintroduced by this Administration in the HHS ANPR in 2018, and was incorporated into H.R. 3, the drug pricing bill passed by the House on December 12, 2019.  Although international reference pricing was not included in S. 4199, the Republican-sponsored Senate drug pricing bill introduced by Senator Grassley on July 2, it is now definitively being championed by Trump.  Regardless of the fate of this Executive Order or the result of the upcoming election, this bipartisan concept will not go away soon.