[V]ermont officials are trying to discern what a new Trump administration plan for importing cheaper prescription drugs from Canada might mean for a state plan already in the works.
Alex Azar, President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, announced on Wednesday that the administration was taking steps to allow states to create pilot programs to import prescription drugs from Canada to lower costs to U.S. consumers.
State legislators in Vermont passed a bill in 2018 calling for the state to develop its own proposal for importation, originally set to be submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this July.
But lawmakers decided to hold off an extra year to work with two other states — Colorado and Florida — devising similar proposals, so they could submit their requests together and combine the bipartisan clout of their respective congressional delegations.
Officials from Vermont spoke Thursday afternoon with their counterparts in Colorado and Florida about how their plans will change given the presidential proposal. The National Academy for State Health Policy is providing pro bono technical assistance to help them navigate the bureaucratic path ahead.
“Certainly this invitation from Health and Human Services formalized the process,” said Ena Backus, director of health care reform for Vermont’s Agency of Human Services. “So it’ll be a really big difference between how to go about this from previously to now.”
While the states were originally prepared to forge their own path to bringing in the Canadian drugs, the federal government has indicated it will create a formal pathway for states and municipalities to use.
Backus said the approach described in the Trump administration’s announcement is consistent with the direction Vermont and other states have been working in. Now, she said, there’s just a rule-making process that’s going to govern how that process works.
“For our policy to be viable, we knew we would need federal collaboration and approval and this announcement indicates we have both,” Gov. Phil Scott said in a statement.
Scott — who recently blasted Trump for recent racist tweets about Democratic congresswomen of color — said he wanted to “give credit where credit is due.”
“We are pleased to have federal partners from both the executive and legislative branches who share our concern over the huge impact filling prescriptions and purchasing health insurance has on families’ checkbooks,” Scott said.
But not everyone is so sure that the news is as good as it sounds. Rachel Sachs, a drug policy expert at Washington University in St. Louis, told the New York Times: “This is a plan to make a plan on importation,” adding that rule-making could take more than a year.
Trump is also certain to face intense pushback from the pharmaceutical industry, which immediately came out with statements saying that patient safety would be jeopardized by imported drugs outside the U.S. regulatory structure. (Azar himself opposed the import scheme until shifting his stance recently.)
Vermont’s Senate leader Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, released a statement cautioning Vermonters to be wary of whether the president would actually make good on his word.
“While on its face this is good news, it should go without saying that we have no good reason to trust the Trump administration will actually carry out this work, or if they do, to do so in a way that will actually help patients, families, and taxpayers,” Ashe wrote.
He instead urged the state to accelerate its time frame for submitting the proposal to HHS “in order to help patients and deliver financial relief to Vermonters before the president changes his mind.”
Backus said she’d be happy to sit down with the legislators like Ashe to talk about what this announcement means and where Vermont stands.
“But definitely know that whereas there was no invitation for states to move forward previously, there now is an invitation,” she said. “And that is an encouraging signal.”
