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On its signature drug pricing pitch, the White House is out on its own

Republicans on Capitol Hill are willing to back President Trump on everything from his 4 a.m. tweets to his multi-billion dollar wall. But when my colleague Lev Facher and I asked them what they thought about his plan to tie what Medicare pays for drugs to what other countries pay, key members of the GOP weren’t exactly singing its praises. Of the dozen lawmakers we surveyed this past week, only one or two really expressed any positive ideas about it.

“I applaud the president and what he’s trying to do, but at the same time I’m struggling a little bit on whether that’s really price controls,” Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) said.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who sat through a meeting with HHS Secretary Alex Azar and several GOP colleagues about the proposal this week, had similar reservations.

“It was a free market group obviously, so any time you start talking about price management that’s a different type of conversation,” he said.

Added together, it’s not a great sign for the Trump administration, especially since those comments came after HHS Secretary Alex Azar spent the week on Capitol Hill trying to drum up support for the idea. If powerful lawmakers really don't like the idea, they could kill it with legislation — or the threat of legislation — to rein in HHS’ authority. (Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) already called on his colleagues to do exactly that.)

Azar can’t necessarily count on Democratic support in the Senate, either. Though there’s a bunch of progressive Democrats ready to take even bolder steps on drug pricing, at least one pivotal Democratic Senate leader, Patty Murray of Washington, didn’t praise the international pricing plan.

“Looking at how we can reduce health care costs is really critical, but we have to make sure we are lowering patients’ costs and were not impacting the economy in the wrong way,” she told STAT.

Azar is slated to meet with Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee later this month. The top Democrat on that committee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, told STAT he’s still waiting for more details on how the idea would work.

“If you can divine from this administration any of the details with respect to how they would actually carry out such a policy, good on you because Congress hasn’t been able to,” Wyden told STAT.