25-06-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
The Drug-Price Surrender to China
During my time chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee, I saw firsthand how China wages economic warfare—stealing intellectual property, subsidizing its domestic industries, and exploiting America's openness to gain the upper hand. Beijing has its sights set on America's longstanding leadership in biomedical innovation and is closing in. Unfortunately, some in Washington support policies with significant unintended consequences.
President Trump's executive order on most-favored-nation drug pricing proposes to tie U.S. prices to the lowest prices paid by other wealthy countries. At first glance, it seems reasonable. Who doesn't want to pay less at the pharmacy? But the policy misunderstands global pharmaceutical markets and our own benefit system. It risks giving Beijing exactly what it wants: the collapse of America's innovation edge in medicine, and perhaps one of America's remaining bastions of industrial leadership.
