When in Doubt, Pretend to Be Lina Khan

[Celerity]

The Trump administration’s plans to lower prices are just Biden-era retreads. Unfortunately, they’re just plans, with no expected follow-through.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/22/when-in-doubt-pretend-to-be-lina-khan-trump-drug-pricing-ftc/


President Trump speaks during an event about drug prices, November 6, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House. Credit: Evan Vucci/AP Photo

On the surface, Donald Trump is disinterested in the nation’s abiding cost-of-living concerns. Everything is fine, the president insists, loudly if he has to. His shrinking economic approval ratings are a lie, the term “affordability” is a hoax, and the news, you see, is fake. Behind the scenes, the White House is desperate for any good story to tell that corresponds to Trump’s campaign promise to lower prices, with the emphasis on “story.” Lowering or even moderating prices is a tall order for this administration, because the tension between doing anything beneficial for the public and how that would damage profits for big corporations and their $10,000-an-hour lobbyists is simply too great. A story is simple: You feed the rubes with something that sounds good, but which in the end will fizzle out or not add up to anything of value.

What’s amusing is that when the Trump administration goes looking for these stories, they come crawling over to the best ideas of the Biden administration, the one deemed the worst in American history. Sadly enough, if they bothered to follow through, the ideas could actually work. For instance, the administration continues to tout deals with drug companies for its direct-to-consumer cash-only website for medications, which will not lower drug prices for the vast majority of Americans who get prescription drugs through insurance, and will in fact entrench the higher prices by keeping them in place for insurance transactions. Most of the “cheaper” drugs were near the end of patent protection and would have seen their prices driven down by generic competition anyway. It’s a fake solution.

The better solution for high drug prices is to use the power of the government to negotiate the price paid for our many public-health programs. You can do this for Medicaid, but prices are already mandated to be low by law, and patients already pay no more than a few dollars for medications in the program. Even if states are saving a little money on the list price, it won’t translate to patient affordability. Medicare is a more broad-based program with a sicker population; lowering list prices there could make a real difference and even cross over into prices for everyone else. That would be, you know, the Democratic program passed in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act. And while those prices only begin to kick in next year because of political malpractice, they are rolling out under Trump. In fact, the administration announced price cuts last month for the next round of 15 drugs that will take effect in 2027, reducing list prices between 38 and 85 percent.

The only thing Trump has done other than follow the rules for Medicare price negotiation is exempt some of the most high-cost drugs from the program. But since people don’t follow political debates closely, they will associate the lower prices on ten drugs in Medicare next year, and more in future years, with Trump. Unfortunately for him, he has stepped on this message with his huckster website that won’t do anything for most people. Expanding the Biden negotiations would have been the move here. Separate from this, there’s been a minor resurgence from the Federal Trade Commission, or at least from their press release shop. This month, the FTC announced it would begin to make rules prohibiting certain hidden junk fees in rental housing. It quietly reopened the “click to cancel” rule that would make ending a subscription-based service as easy to do as signing up for it.

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