A new report by Senate Democrats suggests that "most favored nation" deals intended to lower prescription drug prices in the U.S. may not be effectively impacting patients, as drug costs continue to climb and pharmaceutical companies report significant profits. The findings raise concerns about the transparency and effectiveness of these agreements.
The findings raise questions about whether the administration’s “ most favored nation ” deals are having a meaningful impact on patients. You could soon pay half for prescription drugs, or even less than that. NBC 5’s Patrick Fazio has the story with drugmakers would bring down prescription drug prices in the U.S. But a report released by Senate Democrats finds prices have continued to climb — in some cases, sharply.
The report — released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, ahead of a hearing focused on drug prices — found that companies have raised the cost of hundreds of medications and launched new ones at an average price of $353,000 a year. WATCH HERE The report also said the companies that signed deals with Trump have made huge profits during his second term in office. In 2025, the companies made a combined $177 billion in profits, up from $107 billion the year before. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to testify Thursday in back-to-back hearings on Trump’s budget, first before the House Ways and Means Committee and later before the House Appropriations health panel. He is likely to face questions on Trump’s priorities, including lowering prescription drug costs.
— which Trump said would lower U.S. drug prices to match those in other wealthy countries where drugs are often far less expensive — are having a meaningful impact on patients. The deals with the drugmakers were publicized by the White House, but details remain scant. It’s unclear whether the drugs mentioned in the new report were a part of the deals, though all of the drugmakers included were. “One of the more frustrating aspects of recent drug pricing announcements has been the lack of transparency into the so-called deals that are being made by the administration,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “In fact, once you dig into the details, it appears that the administration’s efforts to date have mostly served to help drug companies.”
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Sanders’ report “fixates on prescription drug list prices, which are meaningless because they do not reflect the actual purchase prices that patients pay at the pharmacy counter.” As a part of the deals, drugmakers agreed to offer some of their products for a discounted price for people paying with cash, not insurance, on TrumpRx.gov, a discount prescription drug platform. Many of the discounts are the same as those found on GoodRx, another discount site. These discounts are separate from the list prices. And while people rarely pay the list price for a drug, a higher list price means drugmakers can charge insurance more. The new report pointed to several blockbuster drugs that saw list price hikes even as companies were negotiating or signing deals with Trump. For example, the list price of Keytruda, a widely used cancer treatment made by Merck, rose by 6% to about $210,000 a year in the U.S., far higher than prices in countries like Japan and France , according to the report. Novartis’ Kesimpta, a multiple sclerosis drug, increased by nearly $10,500 to $141,000 a year, according to the report. The annual price of Kesimpta in Germany is $17,300 and the yearly price in Canada is $23,500. The annual list price of Opdivo, Bristol Myers Squibb’s immunotherapy, rose 4% to $260,000, more than double the price in other countries, including France and the United Kingdom .
Antonio Ciaccia, the CEO of 46brooklyn, a nonprofit group that tracks drug pricing in the U.S., said it’s been clear that the companies that signed deals with Trump did not agree to lower prices across their entire portfolio. For many of the drugs not included in the deals, it’s been “business as usual and this year is no different,” he said. He added that while average brand-name list prices declined in 2026 for the first time, that shift was largely driven by policies from the Biden administration, including The report also found that companies that negotiated deals with Trump launched new medications, many of them cancer drugs, with six- to seven-digit price tags. According to the report, Johnson & Johnson’s cancer drug Inlexzo launched at a price of about $1 million; AbbVie’s cancer drug Emrelis is about $719,000; and AstraZeneca’s Datroway is about $419,000. Novartis’ Itvisma, a one-time gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy, has a list price of about $2.59 million.
Another gene therapy from Novartis — Pfizer increased the price of its lung cancer drug Vizimpro by about 5% to about $208,000 a year, according to the report.
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