When it comes to drug prices, Azar’s toughest crowd is his own party

The Trump administration’s signature drug pricing policy — tying some Medicare drug payments to the prices overseas — is in the unfortunate position of being pretty unpopular with the president’s own party. But Alex Azar, Trump’s health secretary and go-to defender of the plan, said he counts even mild Republican criticism as a win.

“Let me put it this way: I don’t think you’ve seen any Republican leadership or Republican chairman come out firmly against what we’re doing,” Azar said yesterday in an interview at STAT’s headquarters in Boston. “They’re remaining open-minded and considering it.”

It helps, Azar said, that he brings conservative bona fides from his time in the George W. Bush administration. His past as an executive at Eli Lilly doesn’t hurt either. But whether he’ll be able to convince Republicans that the plan is beneficial to taxpayers and not, as Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, “foreign countries setting our drug prices,” remains to be seen.

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