November 16, 2020

Dear President Trump,

On behalf of our more than 300,000 activists and supporters across the country, the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) urges you to halt implementation of and immediately withdraw the “most favored nation” (MFN) executive order that will impose foreign price controls on American medicines. 

The executive order relies on an International Pricing Index (IPI) to determine “most favored nation” pricing for Medicare Parts B and D drugs, meaning the price controls of foreign nations, many of which have socialized medicine systems, will control reimbursement rates here in the United States. 

More than 80 free-market and center-right organizations, led by Americans for Tax Reform and including CFIF, remain united in our strong opposition to the order. As that massive coalition wrote a few months ago, “Adopting these price controls will slow medical innovation, threaten American jobs, and undermine criticism of single-payer systems. In addition, a United States embrace of price controls will make it immeasurably more difficult to get foreign countries to pay their own way in the development of new medicines.”

Moreover, as CFIF pointed out in July when the Administration first announced its executive order, and again when the order was expanded and advanced in September, price controls simply do not work, regardless of the product targeted or the country in which they’re attempted, and real-world experience establishes that pharmaceutical price controls are no different.  

For example, other nations receive far fewer new lifesaving and life-improving drugs than American consumers, which enjoyed access to 96% of all new cancer drugs over the past decade. In contrast, only 56% of those same drugs became available in Canada, merely 50% became available in Japan and only 11% in Greece, as just three examples. The MFN order threatens that access.

Finally, the MFN executive order contradicts the preferences of U.S. consumers and voters regarding the general role of government in health care. A recent national survey conducted by Public Opinion Strategies for CFIF measured the health care priorities of voters nationally and in 12 key swing states ahead of the November 2020 election.  It found that “voters, across party, overwhelmingly prefer the role of the federal government to be that of providing oversight and incentives to health care providers, prescription drug companies and health insurers to encourage competition to lower prices in the health care system (70%) rather than having the federal government set prices and determine what services and medicines are covered by private health plans (30%).”   

For those reasons and others, we again strongly encourage you to halt implementation of the MFN executive order and withdraw it.

Thank you for your time and consideration on this important issue.