By Patrick Wingrove
(Reuters) – Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks on Tuesday said at the Economic Club of Washington that tax and regulation reform and drug affordability were some policy focuses for the company in a second Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump met with Ricks and the chief executive of industry lobbying group PhRMA in Florida last week. It was also reported that Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla attended.
The Lilly CEO did not share details of that conversation during an interview with Carlyle Group cofounder David Rubenstein. Nor did he provide more information about the exact reforms he was targeting.
He said the regulatory situation in the U.S. had evolved in a negative way for the pharmaceuticals industry over the last four years.
“My experience having done this for eight years is there’s often more common ground than you think,” said Ricks, who has been CEO of Lilly since 2017.
Ricks said that the Trump administration may raise the policy argument that other developed countries should pay more for drugs, and then prices in the U.S. can be lowered.
Americans pay more for medicines than people in any other country.
Drugmaker executives have previously said they will push to revamp the new law that allows Medicare to negotiate prices for its costliest prescription drugs once Trump is back in office, as well as reform rules governing pharmacy middlemen that negotiate volume-based discounts with drug manufacturers.
Ricks said Lilly had helped bring the cost of some of its insulins down to $35 a month by “compressing what these middlemen get”.
Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the United States’ top health agency, was also present at Ricks’ meeting with the president-elect, according to an Axios report last week.
The report said Trump and the company executives discussed how the public and private sectors can collaborate on finding cures for cancer, among other topics.
(Reporting by Patrick Wingrove in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
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