Draining the Pharma swamp: Donald Trump announces plan to hammer Big Pharma’s monopoly profits by requiring competitive bidding for government drug purchase contracts

In a welcome announcement during a press conference today, President-elect Donald Trump announced a plan to shatter the monopolistic pricing of Big Pharma that has been draining literally trillions of dollars from the government for the past two decades.

“Pharma has a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” said Trump. “There’s very little bidding on drugs. We’re the largest drug buyer in the world, and we’re going to start bidding. We’re going to start saving billions of dollars on drugs.” (RELATED: See more coverage of President Trump at Trump.news)

Trump is referencing the fact that all the former Presidents in recent memory — Clinton, Bush and Obama — have maintained what can only be called a “monopoly pricing drug cartel” in the United States, where the U.S. government pays outrageously high prices for prescription medications purchased via Medicare, federal health coverage plans and VA Hospital operations. The utter lack of competitive pricing has been kept in place by an army of pharma lobbyists “bribing” complicit lawmakers and bureaucrats to keep high prices in place and eliminate competitive bidding for prescription medication purchase contracts. (RELATED: See daily coverage of medicine news at Medicine.news)

$324.6 billion a year in overpriced prescription medications to appease Big Pharma lobbyists

As a result, the federal government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on overpriced prescription drugs each year, dolling out a whopping $324.6 billion on prescription drugs in 2015 alone. “Spending on prescription drugs outpaced all other services in 2015,” says a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid report entitled National Health Expenditures: 2015 Highlights.

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That same report reveals that U.S. health care spending has now reached $3.2 trillion annually, or nearly $10,000 per person. If this spending isn’t curtailed, it’s going to bankrupt America and will soon hit an astonishing 25% of GDP, meaning 1 out of every 4 dollars generated in the entire U.S. economy will be going to drug companies, cancer treatment centers, hospitals, doctors and medical device manufacturers.

High drug prices weaken U.S. worker competitiveness in global marketplace

Obviously, that rate of expenditure is unsustainable. It also makes U.S. workers far more expensive than workers in overseas regions, harming the economic competitiveness of U.S. companies. In order for U.S. workers to remain competitive, U.S. health care costs need to be drastically reduced… and that means finally forcing drug companies to compete on pricing rather than receiving “full retail” monopoly-priced reimbursements from the federal government.

Making America Great Again, in other words, means stopping the federal government from being ripped off by Big Pharma.

Notably, Hillary Clinton’s campaign accepted millions of dollars from Big Pharma sources, and there’s little question that Clinton, if she had won the election, would have maintained the status quo of monopoly prices. See “Hillary Clinton will not challenge FDA Monopoly” and “If you support Hillary Clinton, you support big pharma and mandatory vaccinations.” (RELATED: Find more news on Hillary Clinton at Clinton.news)

In contrast, Donald Trump is genuinely “draining the swamp” by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse across many sectors of the federal government. Big Pharma just got served: The era of easy profits and a compliant federal government writing unlimited fat checks is now coming to an end.

Every American fed up with unaffordable drug prices, outrageous health insurance premiums and the corruption and influence of lobbyists in Washington D.C. should applaud this announcement by Trump.