President Trump and senior members of his cabinet have stated their intention to use trade deals to end “foreign freeloading” on drug prices and push up prices to bring them closer to US levels.

Leaked documents of secret UK-US trade talks shows medicines were discussed at these meetings. In fact negotiations have advanced even further than we feared they had. The US and UK have already finished initial discussion on lengthening patents for medicines.

Research carried out for Dispatches suggested that provisions relating to medicines in a trade deal with the US, such as those discussed at the secret meetings, could cost the NHS £27 billion a year.

The research showed that the cost of some treatments could rise by nearly eleven times, with the top twenty medicines an average of 4.8 times more expensive in the US.

The table below shows how costs could soar for 20 of the most common medicines:

Table taken from ‘How could a new US-UK trade agreement affect NHS drug prices?‘, by Dzintars Gotham, Melissa J Barber of the Harvard T.H Chan Scholl of Public Health and Andrew M Hill of the University of Liverpool Department of Translational medicine

It’s clear you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS.