Zanny Minton-Beddoes

It's the place where the newest and best drugs come to market first.

But consumers pay more in the United States.

Whereas in somewhere like in the UK, where I'm from, where we have the National Health Service, the National Health Service drives a very hard bargain with drug companies and will only agree to buy drugs if they feel that they are not just effective, but also cost effective.

And so they end up forcing the drug companies to sell at a much cheaper price.

And

The Trump administration has basically said this is not fair on Americans.

We're being ripped off.

But the sort of remedy that he has proposed, as you've described, of tariffs is not one that is going to help this.

And certainly the impact of having tariffs on imported drugs plus the end of subsidies for health care is a double whammy for the U.S.

patients.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

You raise a very important point, which is and this this sounds abstract, but it's actually really important.

For most of the world for the last 80 years in the post-war era, we had a system of global rules for trade, which was based on something called MFN, most favored nation status.

And what that meant was it was essentially a rule that said when a country imposed a tariff, it had to impose the same tariff on all countries.

So you couldn't have one tariff on France and another tariff on Europe.

India.

If you imposed a 5% tariff on a good coming into your country, you'd impose it on everybody.

And what the United States has done under the Trump administration essentially has completely thrown away that system and said, we're not playing by those rules any longer.

We are going to have different tariffs for different countries.