After last week’s launch of TrumpRx, President Trump described the discounted drug platform as “one of the most transformative health care initiatives of all time.” But experts and health care advocates said that limitations with the new service could undermine its value to consumers.
“The prices are absolutely cheaper than list prices, but only for cash patients or patients whose insurance does not sufficiently cover these drugs,” Yunan Ji, a health policy expert at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, told CBS News. “For a small share of the market, it will deliver meaningful savings, but it is not going to change the whole drug pricing landscape for most Americans.”
Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, an advocacy group for health care consumers, applauded the Trump administration’s effort to lower drug prices for Americans. But he said TrumpRx doesn’t serve as a “one-stop shop” for consumers who want to compare drug prices and secure the lowest costs, describing the system as more of a “catalog of coupons from existing programs from drug companies.”
Wright also said he’d like to see TrumpRx offer a broader range of drugs, including those used to treat cancer and other diseases (see below for a list of all drug discounts available through TrumpRx.)
The White House told CBS News that such discounts only exist because the Trump administration negotiated so-called “most-favored-nation” agreements with pharmaceutical firms to lower prices. Under that policy, drugmakers must sell meds to U.S. customers at the same prices available in other countries, including those with lower drug costs.
TrumpRx is also focused on offering the lowest prices on branded products, the White House noted, acknowledging that more affordable generic versions of the drugs may be available elsewhere.
A drawback of TrumpRx is that discounts are available only to patients who buy drugs in cash, Wright said. That means people must pay for prescriptions out of pocket and can’t use their health insurance, while those expenses will not count toward meeting a consumer’s health plan deductible.
“It is focused pretty narrowly on people who are uninsured and are buying prescription drugs with cash rather than through a health plan,” Wright told CBS News.
When TrumpRx launched on Feb. 5, the site listed more than 40 brand-name drugs, with the Trump administration saying that more discounted medications will be added over time.
Merith Basey, CEO of Patients For Affordable Drugs Now (P4ADNow), a national patient organization that works to lower drug prices, said the coupons TrumpRx offers are not unique to the platform, noting that similar discounts are already available in the marketplace.
To assess the savings available through TrumpRx, the group compared the service with what consumers can find for the same drugs via GoodRx, a Santa Monica, Calif., company that offers discounted meds. TrumpRx’s pricing was superior for only eight drugs, P4ADNow found, as follows:
GoodRx offered equally steep discounts on 33 of the drugs listed on TrumpRx, while cheaper generic alternatives were available for 15 TrumpRx medications, according to the group’s analysis.
For example, Colestid, a drug that lowers cholesterol for people at risk of heart disease, costs $67.20 if purchased through TrumpRx, while a generic version of the drug costs $21.70.
Most insurers don’t cover weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. TrumpRx and GoodRx both offer Ozempic for $199 for a 0.25 milligram pen, which has a list price of over $1,000.
The same is typically true of fertility drugs, including Gonal-F, which costs $252 with a TrumpRx or GoodRx coupon and which has a list price of nearly $1,200.
For now, TrumpRx offers discounts on a total of 43 drugs, as follows:
