A CT senator opposes Trump executive order on drug prices. Here’s what he’s doing about it

Hartford Courant – Tuesday, April 22, 2025
By Christopher Keating

Citing rising prices, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is calling for lowering prescription drug costs after a new executive order by President Donald Trump.

While Trump says his goal is lowering prices, Blumenthal says his order would backfire.

Trump’s move “actually is a step backward because he is rolling back the steps taken to promote negotiation under Medicare of drug prices,” Blumenthal told The Courant outside a Walgreens pharmacy on the Hartford-West Hartford border.

“What he has done, essentially, is adopt the drug industry’s talking points about the need for delay in issuing the guidelines for Medicare negotiation and thereby deprive consumers of the benefits of lower prices generally. … Medicare negotiation is a supremely important tool to lower them.”

For years, consumer advocates had been fighting a bitter battle in Congress to allow negotiations on prescription drug prices under Medicare. That was finally signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022 as a provision of the broader Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The measure covers various drugs in Part D and Part B of Medicare.

“It has already lowered the price of insulin and other drug prices,” Blumenthal said. “Just as a footnote, Connecticut put a cap on insulin prices as a matter of state law — so we were ahead of the curve. There’s been some progress, but nowhere near enough.”

Trump order

As he has done on various policies, Trump blamed the Biden administration for taking a different approach on prescriptions.

“The Biden Administration then signed into law the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which included the Medicare Prescription Drug Negotiation Program,” Trump wrote in his order. “While this program has the commendable goal of reducing the drug prices Medicare and its beneficiaries pay, its administratively complex and expensive regime has thus far produced much lower savings than projected.”

He added, “Further, accompanying changes to the Medicare Part D program led to inflated premiums and diminished coverage choices for seniors, prompting a taxpayer-funded bailout of insurance companies offering Part D plans. Finally, the program imposes price controls on small molecule prescription drugs, usually in tablet or capsule form, four years earlier than on large molecule biological products.

“Known as the “pill penalty,” this discrepancy threatens to distort innovation by pushing investment towards expensive biological products, which are often indicated to treat rarer diseases, and away from small molecule prescription drugs, which are generally cheaper and treat larger patient populations.”

Blumenthal questions the legality of Trump’s executive order and says it is “highly challengeable” in court, where he says various nonprofits would have standing to bring a civil lawsuit in the same way that other orders have been challenged.

At the same time, Blumenthal is cosponsoring the bipartisan Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act with U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, that was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 3 as it winds its way through Congress.

“This bill would stop the drug industry from creating a thicket of claims and litigation that prevent new drugs from coming to market,” Blumenthal said. “It’s complicated, but supremely important.”

Separately, Blumenthal is also cosponsoring a measure known as the Capping Prescription Costs Act, which would enact the same Medicare provisions for all patients by capping out-of-pocket costs at $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families. Anyone who has private insurance, regardless of their age, would have the same cost limits as those currently on Medicare.

“It would build on the Medicare model, expand it, and include private insurance,” Blumenthal said. “The out-of-pocket costs create such an obstacle. People figure, ‘I have health insurance. I’m all set.’ Then they discover they need a drug that costs thousands of dollars, and they have to pay out of their pocket for a substantial part of it.”

Rising costs

At the state level, Connecticut officials are concerned about rising medical costs, including an increased number of patients going to hospitals and large increases in pharmacy costs for prescription drugs, including GLP-1s that are used to treat diabetes and obesity. Although the drugs have been on the market for years, they were more recently approved to treat obesity, thus increasing usage and the costs.

The state spent $40 million during the last fiscal year on GLP-1 drugs, and this year the total is expected to jump to $65 million, said Josh Wojcik, policy director for the state comptroller. The majority of the money is still related to diabetes, he said.

Despite years of debates in Congress and nationwide, the issue of prescription drugs remains unresolved.

“The American people deserve better,” Trump wrote in his executive order. “It is time to restore the progress our nation made in my first term to deliver lower prescription drug prices by putting Americans first and making America healthy again.”

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