ALEXANDRIA, VA – Today, President Trump announced new details about implementation of the "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) executive order.  The rule relies on an International Pricing Index (IPI) to determine MFN pricing for certain Medicare drugs, meaning the price controls of foreign nations, many of which have socialized medicine systems, will control reimbursement rates here in the United States.

Below is a statement by CFIF President Jeffrey Mazzella in response to today’s announcement:

“Reducing consumer costs in health care is important. But this ‘Most Favored Nation’ rule is the wrong approach. Indeed, the MFN rule is a prescription for disaster that hamstrings pharmaceutical innovators at the worst possible time: in the middle of a pandemic.

“Free-market and other center-right organizations remain united in our opposition to the MFN order. As a massive coalition of 80 such organizations 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.’

“More specifically, 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 rule threatens that access.

“Finally, the MFN rule 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%).’  

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