President Donald Trump on Monday said his administration reached new drug pricing deals with nine pharmaceutical companies, widening a push to tie U.S. medicine prices to lower rates paid abroad.
The companies signing on are Alcon, Astellas Pharma, BeOne Medicines, BridgeBio, CSL, Kyowa Kirin, Sun Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals and UCB, according to the White House. Under the voluntary agreements, the firms will offer discounts on outpatient drugs to every state Medicaid program, bringing the prices states pay in line with what the companies charge in foreign countries. The deals cover treatments for chronic and rare conditions including hemophilia, liver disease, skin disorders and certain cancers.
The nine new agreements bring the total number of drugmakers participating in the Trump administration’s pricing initiative to 26, a group the president said represents 90% of the domestic pharmaceutical market. Trump said the remaining 10% of the industry is “also coming in” and “have no choice.”
The expansion builds on the administration’s “most favored nation” policy, revived by an executive order in May 2025. That policy aims to lower U.S. drug prices to levels comparable to those in other developed countries, a move Trump has framed as ending “global freeloading.” Over the past year, the administration had already reached similar deals with 17 other companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
The agreements come as the White House sharpens its focus on healthcare affordability in the run-up to the midterm elections. But the pricing push has also begun to reshape the business strategies of major pharmaceutical firms. To guard against potential tariffs, drugmakers are spending billions to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. and are expanding direct-to-consumer sales channels, including offering medicines through the president’s TrumpRx portal. Lower U.S. prices are weighing on earnings, with companies like Novo Nordisk cautioning that it will take time for higher prescription volumes to offset the revenue decline.
The scale of the price gap is stark: U.S. prescription drug prices average nearly three times higher than those overseas, according to a 2024 study by Rand Corp., with branded drugs costing more than four times as much. Industry trade group PhRMA, which represents many large drugmakers, has argued that most-favored-nation pricing is not the best way to reduce costs for Americans, placing blame instead on pharmacy benefit managers.
Even so, the U.S. remains the single most important market for many pharmaceutical companies, including European firms. Half of the 10 largest drugmakers on the continent generate a majority of their sales in the U.S., underscoring the high stakes of Washington’s pricing policies for overseas-based manufacturers.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-drug-pricing-deals.html
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