President Trump just delivered a powerful wake-up call to Europe: the days of free-riding on American innovation are over. For too long, socialist price controls overseas have forced hardworking American families to subsidize Europe’s bloated welfare states and their government-run healthcare systems. The President recently called out this unfair practice, saying bluntly, “American patients were effectively subsidizing socialist healthcare systems in Germany, in all parts of the European Union.”
And he’s absolutely right. Europe’s socialist-style price-fixing schemes have not only robbed American companies of fair compensation, they’ve also stifled innovation that could save millions of lives. Make no mistake: America is the undisputed global leader in pharmaceutical and biomedical innovation precisely because we reward risk-taking and entrepreneurship. Our nation leads the globe in breakthroughs and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and diabetes. But European price controls threaten this very innovation and place America’s leadership at risk.
The numbers don’t lie. America produces over half of the world’s new drug discoveries, while Europe lags behind due to their socialist policies. Once a pharmaceutical powerhouse, Europe now struggles to attract investment and cutting-edge research. Our free market has drawn their best researchers and companies to our shores, further widening America’s innovation advantage.
Yet Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and their liberal allies once tried—and thankfully failed—to impose this same disastrous European socialist model here at home. Their misguided policies could have destroyed American innovation, cost millions of jobs, and put China in the driver’s seat for the next generation of cures and treatments.
We simply cannot allow that to happen. President Trump correctly pointed out, “European Union is, in many ways, nastier than China. And we’ve just started with them. They’ll come down a lot. You watch. We have all the cards.” He’s exactly right. Europe exports millions of cars and agricultural products to us, yet they refuse to pay fair market value for our life-saving medicines. This imbalance cannot stand.
The solution is clear, and President Trump is already moving forward with it: renegotiate trade agreements to end European price controls once and for all. Just as the President boldly confronted NATO allies, demanding they pay their fair share for defense, he will ensure Europe pays its fair share for American pharmaceuticals. A recent study showed lifting these price controls would add over $250 billion in revenue, mostly benefiting American companies and American workers.
But the stakes are even higher than just economics. If America adopts European-style price controls, China stands ready to fill the innovation void. Already aggressively entering our pharmaceutical markets with FDA applications for new medications, China aims to dominate global biomedical research. Given their record on intellectual property theft, quality control scandals, and their complicity in smuggling deadly fentanyl into American communities, reliance on China for our pharmaceuticals would be utterly disastrous.
Do we really want to cede leadership to China, waiting on Beijing for critical medicines and breakthroughs? Do we want the next big medical innovation produced in Shanghai rather than Silicon Valley? Of course not. Yet this is precisely what European-style price controls would ensure.
President Trump’s “America First” policy means protecting and growing our pharmaceutical industry, not crippling it with socialist price-fixing. It means maintaining our edge in innovation, creating high-paying jobs right here at home, and ensuring American patients have access to the safest, most advanced treatments in the world.
The President’s message to Europe is crystal clear: if they want access to America’s life-saving medicines, they will pay fair, market-based prices—just like Americans do. No more free-riding. No more socialist schemes. And absolutely no surrendering our pharmaceutical leadership to China. This is about fairness, national security, and above all, putting America First.
