Big Pharma gouging consumers as Trump's touted drug deals fall flat: Senate report

President Donald Trump unveiled a health care plan called the "Most Favored Nation" policy, to try to compel drug manufacturers to charge Americans no more for drugs than their cost in the foreign country where they are sold most cheaply — but a new Senate report reveals drug companies are continuing to gouge with abandon, NBC News revealed on Thursday.

This report comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is set to testify on budget policy, which will likely see him confronted with questions about prescription drug affordability.

"The report — released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, ahead of a hearing focused on drug prices — found that companies that signed drug pricing deals with Trump have raised the cost of hundreds of medications and launched new ones at an average price of $353,000 a year," wrote Berkeley Lovelace Jr. "The price hikes include expensive gene therapies, cancer medications and multiple sclerosis drugs."

Additionally, drug companies partnering with the Trump administration have seen huge surges in profits: "In 2025, the companies made a combined $177 billion in profits, up from $107 billion the year before."

This comes after Trump and Republicans in Congress forced through an extreme cut to Medicaid as part of their partisan "Big Beautiful Bill" tax cut package last year, and allowed expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse, all of which is likely to result in millions more people going without coverage for medical care.

It also comes amid a new report that corporate America has adopted a new strategy to get legally dubious megamergers approved, bypassing career officials at the Justice Department to lobby Trump directly.