This is an opinion column

While President Donald Trump may wish he lives and works in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and has Harry Potter’s magic Elder Wand at his disposal, the reality is he works and lives in the White House and wields a pen.

While presidents often act like executive orders solve problems, history says they are short-term band-aids: good fanfare and politics that solve little to nothing.

America’s Checks & Balances Government

America’s Founding Fathers feared kings, dictators, and all-powerful presidents ruling our newly won republic, so they created a system of checks and balances that distribute federal power among three independent branches of government: executive, judicial and legislative.

All three branches of government must agree (within the confines of their respective powers) on fixes to solve America’s problems.

Trump’s Drug Pricing Executive Order

Trump’s drug pricing executive order is an example of how not to do things. It starts with flowery language and lists wrongs:

• “The United States has less than five percent of the world’s population and yet funds around three quarters of global pharmaceutical profits. This egregious imbalance is orchestrated through a purposeful scheme in which drug manufacturers deeply discount their products to access foreign markets, and subsidize that decrease through enormously high prices in the United States.”
• “The inflated prices in the United States fuel global innovation while foreign health systems get a free ride.”
• “This abuse of Americans’ generosity, who deserve low-cost pharmaceuticals on the same terms as other developed nations, must end. Americans will no longer be forced to pay almost three times more for the exact same medicines, often made in the exact same factories. As the largest purchaser of pharmaceuticals, Americans should get the best deal.”

Trump’s drug pricing executive order then nebulously outlines actions that prompt more questions than answers:

• “My Administration will take immediate steps to end global freeloading and, should drug manufacturers fail to offer American consumers the most-favored-nation lowest price, my Administration will take additional aggressive action.” 

What are “immediate steps” and “aggressive action?”

• “The (Trump Administration) shall take all necessary and appropriate action to ensure foreign countries are not engaged in any act, policy, or practice that may be unreasonable or discriminatory or … that has the effect of forcing American patients to pay for a disproportionate amount of global pharmaceutical research and development, including by suppressing the price of pharmaceutical products below fair market value in foreign countries.” 

How is America to police the entire world on drug pricing? What is “necessary and appropriate action”?

• “Within 30 days (the Trump Administration shall), communicate most-favored-nation price targets to pharmaceutical manufacturers to bring prices for American patients in line with comparably developed nations. … If … not delivered … (my Administration) shall propose a rulemaking plan to impose most-favored-nation pricing.”

How will Trump “price-controls” be set? Isn’t “rulemaking” really “law-making” and isn’t that Congress’s job per the U.S. Constitution?

Trump Drug Pricing Executive Order Is Badly Flawed

• Executive Orders Are Short-Term

Executive Orders are valid only during the term of the president who issues them (in this case: 44 months).

They are short-term solutions that solve nothing long-term and are counterproductive because they give the appearance of solving a problem when they don’t (thus diverting public attention from the problem that needs solving).

America deserves long-term solutions, not short-term band-aids. Long-term solutions require working with Congress to enact solutions into law. That’s what presidential leadership does. That’s what Trump should do.

• Price Controls Don’t Work

America last experimented with price controls with bad results.

In 2011, the Cato Institute emphasized that President Richard Nixon’s 1971 price controls had abysmal results:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman stated that Nixon’s price control “gambit ended ‘in utter failure and the emergence into the open of the suppressed inflation.’”

“[I]t was obvious that price controls didn’t work: ‘Ranchers stopped shipping their cattle to the market, farmers drowned their chickens, and consumers emptied the shelves of supermarkets.’”

President Trump should heed historical results and not copy President Nixon’s price controls failures.

• Drug Price Controls Risk Denying Americans Needed Medicines

Trump wants to force American drug sales at costs equal to the cheapest drug prices in other countries.

That is economically impossible because high America drug prices are caused, in part, by unique, expensive U.S. government burdens, distribution and/or risk factors not present in “cheaper” countries.

For example, in America our tort laws hold drug manufacturers liable for injuries caused by drugs they manufacture and distribute.

In that vein, “Pfizer set aside a whopping 21 billion dollars for settlements following tort lawsuits against the diet drug Fen-Phen.”

In order to cover injury compensation and litigation costs, remain profitable, and stay in business, drug manufacturers must increase American drug prices because, if they don’t, they lose money and go out of business.

If Trump “successfully” forces drug manufacturers to sell in America at cheapest country rates, then higher costs of doing business in America force drug manufacturers to either quit selling certain medicines in America or go bankrupt.

Either way, Americans are denied needed prescription medicines. That’s bad.

Why Are American Drug Prices So High?

There are numerous American studies that detail numerous causes of high American drug prices. In my view, a major culprit is monopolies and oligopolies (too few manufacturers who compete little, if at all).

Monopolies and oligopolies are the enemy of free enterprise and competition that force manufacturers to produce products faster, better, or cheaper . . . or go out of business.

High Drug Price Solutions

Since Trump’s drug pricing executive order is short term, it is not, by definition, a problem solution. That’s irrespective of whether one agrees with the effort.

Rather than rely on free enterprise and competition, America has evolved into a system that does the opposite. So the solution is simple. Get back to basics.

Where there are monopolies and oligopolies, the Trump Administration should use anti-trust laws to break them up.

To the extent patents are the problem (patents prohibit specific medicine competition for decades and decades), patent laws must be adjusted to allow others to produce, thereby forcing competition.

If America gets back to free enterprise and competition, our medicine costs will go down.

That is good.

In contrast, short-term Executive Order “fixes” that feel good but solve nothing are bad.

Trump must do better. That is leadership.

Mo Brooks served on the House Armed Services Committee for 12 years and the Foreign Affairs Committee for 6 years. Brooks graduated from Duke University in 3 years with a double major in political science and economics (highest honors in economics).