White House Threatens Prescription Drug Makers With Price Controls: ‘We’ll Deploy Every Tool’ To Lower Prices

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at Thursday’s press conference that President Donald Trump had signed 17 letters to pharmaceutical company CEOs demanding they lower their prices and threatening to “deploy every tool” to ensure they do so.

Leavitt read a letter from the president to the CEO of Eli Lilly, David Ricks, in which he pledged to end “global freeloading.”

“This unacceptable burden on American families ends with my administration,” the letter continued.

He went on to call on Eli Lilly and other manufacturers doing business in America to take action within 60 days, and noted that “if you refuse to step up, we’ll deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.”

The letter called to “extend the most favored nation pricing to Medicaid, guarantee most favored nation pricing to newly launched drugs, return increased revenues abroad to American patients and taxpayers, and provide for direct purchasing at most favored nation pricing.”

Leavitt went on to say that Trump “expects to further engage with [the CEOs] immediately in good faith.”

Trump signed an executive order in May aimed at slashing prescription drug prices from “30% to 80%”, as he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Watch the clip above via Fox News.