After meeting with pharma lobbyists, Trump drops promise to negotiate drug prices

After meeting with pharma lobbyists, Trump drops promise to negotiate drug prices
The new plan is tax cuts and deregulation.
Updated by Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Jan 31, 2017, 11:50am EST

A lot happened in the 2016 campaign, but one of the things Donald Trump did to win the election was shift to the left on a number of key issues — promising to avoid cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits and adopting a longstanding Democratic pledge to let Medicare negotiate bulk discounts in the price it pays for prescription drugs.

Today, after a meeting with pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and executives, he abandoned that pledge, referring to an idea he supported as recently as three weeks ago as a form of “price fixing” that would hurt “smaller, younger companies.” Instead of getting tough, Trump’s new plan is that he’s “going to be lowering taxes” and “getting rid of regulations.”

“Pharma has a lot of lobbies, a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power. And there’s very little bidding on drugs,” he said at a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “We’re the largest buyer of drugs in the world, and yet we don’t bid properly.”

Today he apparently changed his mind.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/31/14453740/trump-medicare-prescription-drugs