President Donald Trump has signed an executive order on improving Medicare.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order on improving Medicare.
Speaking at the retirement center The Villages in Sumpter County, Florida, Trump said on Thursday that the order, titled “Protecting and Improving Medicare for Our Nation’s Seniors,” delivers on his campaign promise to defend the Medicare program.
“I made you a sacred pledge that I would strengthen, defend Medicare,” said Trump, and suggested that he was making good on his promise by signing “a very historic executive order” to ensure that Medicare “will never be taken away from you. We’re not letting anyone get close.”
The order itself claims that Democrats’ proposals to institute a “Medicare for All” system, which Trump called a “threat like never before,” would strip seniors of their choices and harm beneficiaries. “Instead of ending the current Medicare program and eliminating health choices for all Americans, my Administration will continue to protect and improve Medicare by building on those aspects of the program that work well, including the market-based approaches in the current system,” the order reads.
To achieve those goals, within 1 year, HHS will propose a regulation that will make it easier to obtain Medicare Medical Savings Accounts and include a payment model that adjusts Medicare Advantage (MA) benefits to allow beneficiaries to share in savings from the program through rebates. HHS Secretary Alex Azar will be required to outline an approach to changing Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) payments to more closely align with prices paid in MA, to propose regulation to give beneficiaries more access to providers and plans, and to propose regulations that will reduce burdens on providers and ensure appropriate reimbursement.
The order also calls for providing seniors with more information about healthcare quality and cost, eliminating waste and combatting fraud, and transitioning toward “true market-based pricing” in the FFS Medicare program, which will involve shared savings and competitive bidding.
In his remarks, Trump said that his administration is “lowering the cost of prescription drugs, taking on the pharmaceutical companies,” yet notably, the executive order did not include a provision to implement the administration’s proposed international price index (IPI) to reduce drug costs in Medicare.
In 2018, the administration released a plan to allow CMS to set prices for some drugs, including biologics and biosimilars, using prices paid in other countries as external references. While some stakeholders voiced concerns about the IPI model, the proposal did garner rare bipartisan interest, and in her own plan to lower drug prices for Medicare, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, proposed a similar model that would cap drugs’ prices at 1.2 times the average selling price in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Also included in Pelosi’s plan is authorizing HHS to negotiate prices for up to 250 drugs that lack genereic or biosimilar competition.
What Stands in the Way of Biosimilar Use Across MENA Countries?
May 21st 2025Despite the clear promise of cost savings and expanded access, the path to integrating generics and biosimilars across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is tangled in a web of distrust, inconsistent policies, and deep-rooted cultural preferences for branded drugs.
Escaping the Void: All Things Biosimilars With Craig & G
May 4th 2025To close out the Festival of Biologics, Craig Burton and Giuseppe Randazzo from the Association for Accessible Medicines and the Biosimilars Council tackle the current biosimilar landscape and how the industry can emerge from the "biosimilar void."
The Trump Administration’s Drug Price Actions and Why US Prices Are Already Sky-High
May 17th 2025While the Trump administration’s latest executive order touts sweeping drug price cuts through international benchmarking, the broader pharmaceutical pricing crisis in the US reveals a far more complex web of development costs, profit incentives, and absent price controls—raising the question of whether any single policy, including potential drug tariffs, can truly untangle it.
How AI Can Help Address Cost-Related Nonadherence to Biologic, Biosimilar Treatment
March 9th 2025Despite saving billions, biosimilars still account for only a small share of the biologics market—what's standing in the way of broader adoption and how can artificial intelligence (AI) help change that?
Targeted Reimbursement Encourages Oncology Biosimilar Use
May 7th 2025Incentivizing physicians with modest financial bonuses may seem like a small step, but in Japan’s outpatient oncology setting, it helped push trastuzumab biosimilars toward broader adoption, demonstrating how even limited reimbursement reforms can reshape prescribing behavior under the right conditions.