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In the months after the 2024 election and before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, healthcare executives paid million of dollars to get the ear of the president.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump has told associates that he raised roughly $500 million in that time, with the funds being split into the his inaugural committee and other accounts including a political action committee. Trump’s inaugural fund raised a record $200 million alone, well above the $53 million Barack Obama raised in 2008 and the $62 million Joe Biden raised in 2020.
Healthcare executives were among those who wrote the largest of checks to attend fundraising dinners with Trump in an effort to gain his favor and influence his healthcare agenda, The Journal reports. Soon after his election, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick to be health secretary. Kennedy, who has since been confirmed, has long been a critic of of the pharmaceutical industry and vaccines in particular.
One dynamic that emerged from these dinners was drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — also known as drug middlemen — blaming each other for the high cost of prescription drugs, The Journal reports.
During a dinner in November, Pfizer (PFE-0.46%) CEO Albert Bourla and other pharma execs blamed high drug prices on insurance companies and drug middlemen. The following month, Trump said in a news conference that, “We’re going to knock out the middlemen.”
Then in January the CEOs of the companies that own the three largest PBMs — UnitedHealth (UNH-1.67%), CVS (CVS-1.77%), and Cigna (CI+0.59%) — had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where they argued that pharma companies charged the U.S. more for drugs compared than any other country, The Journal reports.
In an interview before the Super Bowl this month, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals, complaining that drugs in Canada are much less expensive compared to the U.S.
Kennedy, who attended some of these dinners, was surprisingly quiet throughout them, The Journal reports. Bourla told investors earlier this month that he doesn’t expect to agree with everything Kennedy says, but that there are things they can “collaborate” together on such combating chronic diseases.
“I feel cautiously optimistic that they will be very, very prudent with everything they try to do,” Bourla said of Kennedy and the Trump administration.