The pharmaceutical industry is interested in one thing and one thing only: charging Americans exorbitant prices for the prescription drugs they sell. This is why they continue to argue against common-sense solutions, like President Trump’s “most favored nation” plan to stop Americans from being forced to pay dramatically higher prescription drug prices than every other developed nation. They want Americans to stay locked into this bad deal.

We are fortunate President Trump continues to put America first and has been consistently willing to take on big drug companies so the American people can achieve relief from their price-gouging and monopolistic, anti-competitive practices.

Instead of working with the President and his vision to make prescription drugs more affordable and Make America Healthy Again, we are seeing drug companies once again deflect blame onto others in the marketplace.

One thing is for certain: these talking points are straight out of the Big Pharma agenda to protect their own profits and have nothing to do with lowering drug costs or making health care more accessible.

The truth of the matter is that big drug companies spend millions fronting patient groups and getting others to do their bidding to kill any sort of policy or entity that goes against their profit-making power.

A recent article in the Washington Examiner exposed Big Pharma’s scheme of “bankrolling ostensibly independent nonprofit organizations to push industry talking points in Washington and across the nation.”

Another story from The Wall Street Journal notes that the pharmaceutical industry is funneling millions of dollars to skirt the blame for setting high drug prices.

The calls to undermine President Trump’s direct mandate to take on the pharmaceutical industry are no different.

Americans are paying more than other countries when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Who makes that decision? Drug companies. Big drug companies alone decide what to charge Americans when it comes to the drugs they create.

Their strategy is simple: create the drug, set the price, abuse the patent system to undermine competition from would-be competitors, increase the price, and then advertise these products directly to the American people so they get hooked on these blockbuster drugs—a key problem U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has rightly identified as a major contributor to high drug prices and vowed to crack down on.

This has created a system where the American people are paying more than other countries for prescription drugs. In fact, for brand-name drugs, Americans are paying 422 percent more than other countries. Across all drugs, our country’s prices are 278 percent of the prices being paid by other countries.

Big drug companies’ anti-competitive practices are costing Americans. Specifically, a report from Matrix Global Advisors (MGA) quantified that one practice alone—patent thickets—has cost Americans from $1.8 billion to as high as $7.6 billion in just one year for each of the five drugs analyzed.

Rather than examine their own pricing practices, big drug companies have continuously pushed back against any sort of drug pricing reform that cuts into their own profits and are using others to carry their water to prevent any effective policy that would lower prescription drug costs from becoming a reality.

Those buying into the big drug company rhetoric are nothing more than sellouts to the pharmaceutical industry and adversaries to a free market.

Republicans should be championing greater competition in the prescription marketplace to lower drug costs for the American people, not encouraging policies that give big drug companies a massive government handout and the government more control over our health care system and markets—and that directly go against policies from the President to put America First.