Tom Kean Jr. put his name on a bill that lets drug companies keep charging Medicare full price for some of the most expensive cancer drugs in America. Then he voted to make it law. His own financial disclosure shows he owns stock in two of the companies that benefit.
That's the finding of a new report from American Journal News. We checked it against the bill records and Kean's filings.
What the bill does
In 2022, Congress finally gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices on some of the drugs it spends the most on. That means lower costs for seniors at the pharmacy, and less money out of taxpayers' pockets.
Drugs only become eligible after they've been on the market for years. And drugs for rare diseases — called "orphan drugs" — got an exemption.
The drug industry wanted that exemption made bigger. The result was the ORPHAN Cures Act (H.R. 946). Tom Kean Jr. signed on as a cosponsor on April 7, 2025.
Here's the trick in it: if a drug was first approved for a rare disease and later approved for much wider use, the clock for Medicare negotiations now starts at that later date. That pushes back the day Medicare can bargain over the price of drugs that are now used far beyond the rare disease they were first approved for.
Who wins
According to American Journal News, the change let:
- Merck delay negotiations on Keytruda, an immunotherapy used to treat more than 20 kinds of cancer, which accounts for billions in Medicare spending every year.
- Johnson & Johnson delay negotiations on Darzalex, which treats myeloma and other blood cancers. Medicare spends about $5.6 billion a year on it.
You don't have to take an advocacy outlet's word for it. In October 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed that the law created "a multibillion-dollar windfall for Merck, Bristol Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson," according to the industry trade publication BioCentury. The CBO had already estimated the provision would cost taxpayers around $5 billion over a decade.
Both Merck and J&J lobbied for it, along with the drug industry's trade group.
How it became law
The ORPHAN Cures Act didn't pass by itself. It got folded into Trump's budget bill — the same bill whose Medicaid cuts we've covered in Kean's record on mental health care. When the final version came back to the House on July 3, 2025, Kean voted yes.
A patient group, Patients For Affordable Drugs Now, said at the time that "patients are infuriated to see the Senate cave to Big Pharma by reviving the ORPHAN Cures Act at the eleventh hour."
What Kean owns
Kean's own annual financial disclosure, filed this year, lists:
- Johnson & Johnson stock in three accounts: $250,001–$500,000 in a Kean family partnership, $100,001–$250,000 in his account at State Street Bank, and $15,001–$50,000 in his spouse's account
- Merck stock worth $50,001–$100,000 in his account, plus $1,001–$15,000 in his spouse's
The same report shows him selling part of his J&J stake in July and November 2025 — after the bill he cosponsored became law.
American Journal News adds that J&J executives told investors they were "pleased" with the budget bill on their first earnings call after Trump signed it, and the company's stock surged in the weeks after. Kean has also taken campaign money from the drug industry.
A pattern
This is the same congressman who sent his district taxpayer-funded mail saying he wants to ban members of Congress from trading stocks — while his own filings show trades in every month of 2026 through August, including more Johnson & Johnson sales.
What the filings show
Tom Kean Jr. cosponsored the ORPHAN Cures Act in April 2025 and voted for Trump's budget bill that carried it into law. The Congressional Budget Office says the change handed Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Bristol Myers Squibb a multibillion-dollar windfall; American Journal News names Keytruda and Darzalex among the cancer drugs whose Medicare price negotiations it delayed. Kean's own disclosure lists up to $800,000 in Johnson & Johnson stock across three accounts and up to $115,000 in Merck.
Source
Tom Kean helped Big Pharma protect billions in cancer drug sales — American Journal News
