Biden’s SOTU highlights pharma’s biggest political problem: It is terrifyingly, awfully alone

If you’re a drug company executive, you probably feel like you got up on the wrong side of bed.

On Thursday night, President Biden proposed expanding one of his most popular policies: the Medicare price negotiation process that was put in place as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. “Americans pay more for prescription drugs than anywhere else,” Biden said. “It’s wrong and I’m ending it.”

Obviously, the drug industry is not going to be happy about new price limitations in the U.S., the biggest market for pharmaceuticals. But, even more than that, Biden’s move emphasizes a painful reality: That pharmaceutical companies remain one of the biggest political targets in the country — despite their key role in addressing the Covid-19 pandemic and their development of wildly effective new weight loss drugs.

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