As part of Trump's drug pricing plan, the administration wants to study whether drug copay coupons should be allowed in federal health care programs.
Why it matters: Federal kickback law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from offering drug coupons to Medicare and Medicaid patients because the coupons induce patients to choose certain medications even though cheaper alternatives might be available.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said today that the Trump administration's plan for lowering drug costs relies on expanded price negotiations — just not the kind Democrats have called for in the past, and which President Trump seemed to embrace during the campaign.
The catch: The administration's plan would pull more drugs into an existing system of price negotiations within Medicare. But it’s not clear how many drugs would be affected or how much of that shift the administration could make on its own, without help from Congress.
Pharmaceutical companies' stocks soared Friday when President Trump released his plan to curb prescription drug costs — and that's a pretty accurate assessment of how big a threat this proposal is.
The bottom line: It would mostly move costs around. There are few new steps in here to try to lower the sticker price of prescription drugs. It does call for increased competition from generics — a push that's already well underway at the Food and Drug Administration — but focuses most of its attention on middlemen.
