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PartialHealthcare & Prescription Drugs

The problem is, we don't negotiate. We're the largest drug buyer in the world. We don't negotiate. If we negotiated the price of drugs, Joe, we'd save $300 billion a year.

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PartialFact-checker reviewConfidence: 68%

Both cited sources are reachable and both quotes appear verbatim. KFF Health News documents that Trump did NOT institute government or Medicare negotiation of drug prices in his first term: the exact sentence about the most favored nation model not authorizing the government to negotiate is present, the MFN model never took effect (a federal judge stayed the plan in December 2020), and actual Medicare negotiation authority came from Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The White House PRIMARY source documents the second-term AstraZeneca MFN agreement to bring American drug prices in line with the lowest paid by other developed nations, yielding hundreds of millions in Medicaid savings plus direct-to-patient discounts. Together they substantiate a mixed record fitting PARTIAL: real negotiated deals lowering some prices, but neither the specific promised government-negotiation vehicle nor anything near the claimed 300 billion dollars per year in savings. PARTIAL does not overstate the evidence. The rationale 16 MFN deals figure is not found in the two cited sources, but the core outcome is supported by both.

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