US saves money, world pays the price? Industry research warns: Trump's drug price cuts could backfire as an "incentive" for pharmaceutical companies to raise prices overseas.

A study has found that the Trump administration's push to reduce U.S. drug spending instead creates a powerful incentive for pharmaceutical companies to raise prices and reduce access to medicines in the rest of the world. The president wants prices in Medicare, the federal health program, to match those in other wealthy countries. Yet researchers found that for about three-quarters of the drugs they studied, the revenue a company would lose in the U.S. from charging Medicare a lower price would exceed its total sales of that drug in the lower-priced countries used as the new benchmark. As a result, drugmakers may raise prices in some countries or simply exit those markets altogether, according to the study published Sunday in The Lancet. Pharmaceutical companies have struck a series of deals with the White House, while some are also seeking to use U.S. policy as leverage to raise prices elsewhere. Astellas Pharma, for example, said it secured a higher price in Japan this year for a new eye drug because of concerns about Trump's pricing policies. In Europe, some companies are scaling back plans. Biogen CEO Chris Viehbacher said this year that the company would launch its new postpartum depression drug Zurzuvae in only a handful of European countries, while Roche Holding said it may never launch an unapproved breast cancer pill in its home market of Switzerland. In the study, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital analyzed 195 patented drugs that accounted for $87.9 billion in Medicare spending in 2024. They estimated what the program actually pays for these drugs after accounting for confidential rebates and discounts, and compared that with 19 reference countries. The team found that aligning Medicare drug prices with those countries would save the U.S. government $11.6 billion across the two pilot programs used to test the policy. But that figure would shrink to $3.3 billion if the 17 companies that struck separate pricing deals with the White House were exempted. Earlier this month, nine more drugmakers reached pricing agreements with the government, but those deals were not included in the analysis.