The headlines sound like a massive victory for the American consumer. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just finalized settlements with corporate giants Express Scripts and CVS Caremark, with OptumRx soon to follow. The agency promised these deals would smash out-of-pocket drug costs and bring transparency to a broken system.
Page H2From§Eachthe noon edition — 7 September 2026
FTC finalizes drug-price settlement, taking credit for a cut Ozempic's maker gave itself
As it ran on the front
On Monday the Federal Trade Commission finalized settlements with Express Scripts and CVS Caremark, with OptumRx due to follow, and called it a win for the American consumer. The agency's own account promises smashed out-of-pocket costs and a newly transparent pharmacy-benefit system. The ledger says something else.
Go back a week, to Aug. 31, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the number the FTC is now riding: prescription drug prices fell by more than 3% in 2025, the first such drop since 1963. The Washington Examiner's own report on that data did not trace the decline to a settlement, a subpoena, or an FTC consent order. It traced it to Ozempic's manufacturer, which cut its own price.…
…(cont) Same day, a different building: President Trump stood in the Oval Office and announced nine new "most favored nation" drug-price deals with midsize manufacturers — Alcon, Astellas, BeOne, BridgeBio, CSL, Kyowa Kirin, Sun Pharma, Teva, UCB — bringing the running total to 26 companies, by the administration's own count. Trump called the package "as big as it gets medically." The ceremony landed roughly two months ahead of the November midterms.
Patient advocates were not impressed. Common Dreams quoted skeptics describing the deal count as a distraction from what they called a failed plan to lower drug prices nationwide — a plan the administration had, by its own math, already grown from 17 deals to 26 without moving the number that actually shows up on a pharmacy receipt.
By Sept. 3 even some Republicans were telling reporters the pocketbook win might not convert into votes. That is a strange thing to say about a policy working. It is not a strange thing to say about a headline arriving on schedule.
Which returns us to this week's FTC settlement, filed against pharmacy middlemen while the number Washington keeps citing already had an author, and it was not the agency signing the deal. Ozempic's manufacturer set its own price. The FTC set a press release next to it. Reconciled against the ledger, the gap is the distance between one company's pricing decision and a government's press conference, and it runs the length of the 2026 campaign calendar. Nobody at the FTC cut a price. Somebody at a drug company did, and the invoice for that decision is still getting cashed by people who didn't write it.
“They didn't lower your Ozempic bill, hon — the company that makes it did, and the FTC just stood next to the receipt and smiled for the cameras. Nine deals, 26 companies, an Oval Office ceremony two months before an election — that's not a pricing policy, that's a campaign ad wearing a press release. The savings are real. The credit is stolen.”
“Look, the FTC settlements and the price deals are part of the same broader deregulatory push toward transparency, so honestly it's all one basket of wins — did I say deregulatory, I meant transparency, the administration is very pro-transparency. Sure, the BLS data traces the drop to one manufacturer's own pricing decision, but the settlements set the table for future savings, which is a kind of savings, if you think about it structurally.”
The receipts
· Trump didn’t lower your drug prices — Ozempic did from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Trump announces nine new most-favored-nation deals to lower prescription prices from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Trump’s drug price deals deliver savings, but voters may not reward Republicans from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Trump Pharma Deals Called Distraction From 'Failed Plan to Lower US Drug Prices' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.