In his 2019 State of the Union Address, President Trump triumphantly proclaimed, “America will never be a socialist nation.” This line drew raucous applause from many in the House chamber and, surely, from many sitting and watching at home.

Last year, some supposedly conservative lawmakers - namely those within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) - shocked their admirers by endorsing price controls on prescription drugs. This proposal, known as the international price index (IPI), would tie the prices of Medicare drugs in the U.S. to prices in a select set of foreign nations. Many of those foreign nations already apply their own price controls.