With a team of Washington outsiders, Trump has created new approaches to pricing, payment, and consumer guidance.
When President Donald Trump took office one year ago, the life expectancy of Americans was lower than in 2019.
About 38 million people, or one in 10, suffer from diabetes. Nearly 20 percent of American children are obese.
Health coverage had become increasingly unaffordable. Insurance premiums had risen at twice the rate of inflation for a decade, and six times faster than real income.
Trump had signaled that health care would be a primary focus of a second term well before the 2024 election.
“We want every child in America to grow up and to live a long and healthy life,” Trump said when introducing longtime health advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his campaign.
Make America Healthy Again took its place beside Make America Great Again as a campaign slogan.
“[Trump has kept that pledge] with a full policy suite to systemically lower healthcare costs and also reduce the healthcare services that Americans would even need in the first place,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told The Epoch Times via email.
Here are five ways Trump transformed health policy in his first year in office.
| 1. Outsider Thinking |
| 2. Leveling Drug Prices |
| 3. Overhaul of Nutrition Guidance |
| 4. Revised Child Vaccination Schedule |
| 5. Push for Price Transparency |
1. Outsider Thinking
Trump signaled change with his selection of Washington outsiders for key posts, starting with Kennedy as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is a heart surgeon and a former Columbia University professor who had become better known as a talk show host.
Dr. Marty Makary, tapped to lead the Food and Drug Administration, is a surgical oncologist and former professor at Johns Hopkins University who has written books that criticize health care billing practices and question the medical consensus on some issues.
The administration has been criticized by some and praised by others for questioning long-established practices such as the childhood vaccination schedule and the allocation of medical research funding.
“One of the most consequential things we’re doing involves the power to convene, pulling together people who normally wouldn’t talk with each other, to figure out action steps,” Oz told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview on Jan. 16.
That means favoring conversation over regulation, according to Oz.
“Am I trying to audit you and find you doing something wrong?“ he said. ”Or am I trying to say, ‘Hey, listen, your industry is run amok. You’re not helping the American people anymore. We got to fix it. So what do you want to do?’”
That approach led to the implementation of the Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing policy, Oz said.
He also said that he expected that the approach would work with health insurers.
2. Leveling Drug Prices
Trump used a carrot-and-stick approach to enlist major pharmaceutical makers to voluntarily lower prices for U.S. customers.
The administration balanced the threat of tariffs on imported medications and ingredients with financial incentives to change the long-standing practice of major pharmaceutical companies charging U.S. customers more than 400 percent more for brand-name medications than those living overseas.
The Most-Favored-Nation Prescription Drug Pricing policy asked drug makers to agree to four terms: offer their lowest available prices to Medicaid patients, offer new medications in the United States at the lowest available price, sell some medications directly to Americans at the lowest available prices, and invest revenue from abroad in the United States.
Pharmaceutical companies initially pushed back on the policy.
“Importing foreign prices from socialist countries would be a bad deal for American patients and workers,” Stephen Ubl, president of the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement.
Yet under the threat of U.S. tariffs and with the support of U.S. trade negotiators, major pharmaceutical companies began to make drug pricing deals with the administration and renegotiate prices with other countries.
Fifteen drug makers have agreed to the terms of the Most-Favored-Nation policy since Sept. 30, 2025.
Among the drugs included in these agreements are Amgen’s cholesterol-lowering drug Repatha, which has had its price reduced to $239 from $573; HIV medication Reyataz, by Bristol Myers Squibb, which has had its price lowered to $217 from $1,449; and hepatitis C medication Epclusa, by Gilead Sciences, which has had its price lowered to $2,425 from $24,920.
One criticism of the policy is that it depends on voluntary cooperation from manufacturers, which is not binding for the future. Trump has asked Congress to codify this pricing policy into law, with exceptions for manufacturers that have already entered agreements with the administration.
