Category: Trump’s Promises Not Kept

Last month, Donald Trump claimed that he was going to get popular weight loss drugs, or as infamously referred to them as “fat shots,” to be the same price they were in other countries. He made this claim:

Well, in London you’d buy a certain drug for $130 and even less than that, I guess $88 as of account a month ago. And in New York you pay $1300 for the same thing. So now we’re going to be paying. Instead of 1300, you’ll be paying about $150 and they’ll be paying $150 too. We’re going to pay the same thing. Favored nations.

He was asked for clarification at the time by a reporter:

Reporter: “you mentioned a $1300 drug at the top of this. Were you referring to the weight loss drugs?”

Trump: “Yeah I was referring to Ozempic or the fat loss drug.”

Reporter: “So those are going to be. $150.00 out of pocket for America”

Trump: “Yeah well there’ll be much lower, there’ll be much lower.”

Last week at an announcement about lowered price for weight loss drugs he pre-complained that reporters were not going to cover the lower prices, saying “they don’t write about, you know, they like to not write these things.” It turned out he didn’t deliver on the promise he made. He also said this at that event:

committing to offer Zepbound and Wegovy at most favored nations rates for American patients. This will slash the cost if Wegovy from $1350 a month to ultimately $250. 1,350 to 250.

$250 is significantly more than $150 and even more than $88.

While Donald Trump is claiming he has kept more promises made, among the promises he hasn’t kept so far is either the government or insurance paying for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. It should be fairly obvious he wasn’t going to keep it considering he had this level information when proposed it:

what we’re going to do is for people that are using IVF, which is fertilization, we are govern the government is going to pay for it or we’re going to get or mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that.

When last we covered what was going on, his spokesperson didn’t seem to understand the difference between IVF and an abortion drug.

Nearly two weeks later, he had an Oval Office announcement about IVF, where Heidi Overton, Deputy Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said that Donald Trump had tasked his administration with a much less ambitious task: “So you asked us to lower costs and to fix the broken incentives in health care.”

The announcement involved a claim that an IVF drug would be cheaper in some circumstances and “a new legal pathway to offer fertility benefits directly to employees,” though right after that, the White House was claiming that many employers already provide coverage even without that.

While Donald Trump is claiming he had kept more promises made, among the promises he hasn’t kept so far is either the government or insurance paying for in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. It should be fairly obvious he wasn’t going to keep it considering he had this level information when proposed it:

what we’re going to do is for people that are using IVF, which is fertilization, we are govern the government is going to pay for it or we’re going to get or mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great. We’re going to do that.

At a Friday press briefing with Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, she was asked about that by the Washington Examiners Christian Datoc this way: “Has the president abandoned his campaign pledge to mandate insurance coverage for IVF services?” Leavitt responded “no”. And then he followed up, “Was there any update on that? We flew by that May EO deadline for the White House to produce a plan.” Leavitt confusingly responded that “I literally just read a statement from the Health and Human Services on you uh for you for Libby at least as far as IVF goes.” The statement referenced there was about a generic version of the abortion drug mifepristone, which is not in any way connected to IVF. She then added “I’ll check in with our policy team and we’ll get you some updates.”

The “EO deadline” mentioned in the questioning was a reference to a February executive order instructed staff to come up policy recommendation that are short of the campaign promise:

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.

That was supposed to happen by May and it was reported at the time the recommendations had been provided. Those recommendations were not made public and nothing more seems to have been done since then.

There has been reporting that a Make American Healthy Again alternative was possibly impacting a change in policy.