At Politico Summit, Top Drug Lobbyist Calls Trump’s Efforts To Codify His Signature Drug Pricing Deals 'the Wrong Policy Prescription'

The top lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry cautioned against President Donald Trump’s push to codify his most-favored-nation deals into law as the “wrong policy prescription,” but said he has “identified a real issue” in scrutiny of drug prices in the U.S.

Even as he criticized codifying the high-profile agreements with 16 large drugmakers that Trump touts as a health care success, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America CEO Stephen Ubl praised the administration’s efforts to convince other nations to increase what they pay for medicines.

“The administration deserves enormous credit for the leverage that they're applying in these bilateral discussions with other countries, the U.K. has made some commitments and, hopefully, other countries like Germany, Japan and others will follow suit,” Ubl said.

But he said congressional codification of the deals, whose details are still secret, would be a step too far.

“There's a big difference between individual, voluntary, bespoke agreements that have been reached between the administration and individual companies and codifying the concept of MFN,” Ubl added.

He instead stressed the importance of reforms to the operations of pharmacy benefit managers — which serve as a middleman between drug companies and insurers and employers — and to the 340B hospital program as ways to meaningfully reduce costs for consumers.

The outgoing executive, who announced earlier this month he would leave the largest brand drug lobby at the end of the year, said Congress’ recent efforts to reform how pharmacy benefit managers operate are a good “first step.”

But he maintained more needs to be done to ensure patients benefit from the 340B program, which allows hospitals and other entities who serve low-income communities to buy drugs from manufacturers at a discount.

“Industry supports the 340B program, we think it was well intentioned,” Ubl said. “The problem is that it has grown exponentially over time,” he added.

Ubl, who joined the drug lobby in 2015 after a decade at the largest medical device trade group, made $7.6 million in 2024 leading PhRMA. Under Ubl’s leadership, PhRMA’s lobbying spend rose to a record high $38 million last year as the group sought to combat efforts by the Trump administration to implement a punishing most-favored-nations drug pricing policy.

The most-favored-nation agreements between the administration and drugmakers resulted in tariff exemptions for those companies, but the strategy has left questions for smaller biopharmaceutical companies that may not have the ability to easily negotiate their own deals with the government.

A longtime critic of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, Ubl argued that efforts to implement what he described as price controls in legislation “only get worse over time,” and could result in less innovation and drug discovery.

Last year, Trump’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced the government would see $12 billion in federal savings from the second year of the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug negotiation program.