Trump Just Launched His Discount Drug Platform TrumpRx – What Does That Mean For You?

“Starting tonight, dozens of the most commonly used prescription drugs will be available at dramatic discounts for all consumers throughout a new website,” Trump said at a White House event unveiling the new platform on Thursday evening.

“You’re going to save a fortune,” he said, “and this is also so good for overall health care.”

That said, the range of drugs available on TrumpRx isn’t huge: only 43 at time of writing, with some medications that were announced seemingly not listed. But the administration promises, in its vague way, that more medications – including ones from manufacturers outside of those initial five – will soon join those currently on the site.

How does TrumpRx work?

TrumpRx isn’t selling drugs directly. Instead, it acts as a central hub that either points consumers to drug manufacturers offering discounts on certain products or else gives them discount coupons to use at pharmacies. 

In that respect, it’s not really a change to the status quo. Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, for example, were already offering their blockbuster diabetes and weight loss drugs for a heavily discounted price on their own direct-to-consumer sites – both companies have reported millions of people buying drugs like Zepbound and Wegovy or Ozempic via this method since the sites’ introductions. Users of TrumpRx hoping to access these medications will just be sent to those companies’ portals, which they could have done for months now.

Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical discount and price comparison sites are already common: “There are a lot of patient assistance programs out there,” Christina Madison, founder of The Public Health Pharmacist, told ABC News on Friday, “and this appears similar to programs like GoodRx[.] The difference here is that you would not have to go through the manufacturer's website to get them.”

Is it as good as it sounds?

The Trump administration has made some big claims about how impactful TrumpRx will be for Americans’ healthcare. And in some specific cases, they’re justified: fertility drugs like Gonal-F and certrotide, for example, are listed as being 83 and 93 percent cheaper than retail price, and both are rarely covered by insurance.

“The fertility drug discount is legitimately a big deal for people trying to get IVF,” Benjamin Jolley, a senior fellow for health care at the American Economic Liberties Project, told ABC News. “These medicines are quite expensive and this seems like a big discount […] people prior to this who needed certain drugs would be paying the full $1400 price.”

Dr Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, suggested at the unveiling that the availability of fertility drugs could lead to higher numbers of pregnancies in the US: “We're gonna have a lot of Trump babies with these costs[.]” 

But in general, claims that TrumpRx will be some game-changer in the world of pharmaceutical availability have been met with skepticism by public health experts.

“This is a website that has undergone a lot of hype, but it's not clear exactly how much it's going to help those people who use prescription drugs,” Ben Rome, a health policy researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told NPR. “And for the vast majority of people, it's going to continue to be less expensive for patients to purchase their medicines using their insurance than it is to pay cash prices for the medicines, even if those cash prices are highly discounted below the manufacturer prices.”

For Americans with health insurance – including Medicare and Medicaid – the drugs on TrumpRx are nearly all already covered at equal or even larger discounts than those offered through the new portal. “For instance, one study found that average discounts on brand-name drugs in Medicare Part D were about 40 percent of the retail list price,” pointed out researchers at Georgetown’s Medicare Policy Initiative back in December. “These discounts are much higher in Medicaid, as one Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study found that the total average Medicaid rebate rate is about 77 percent of the retail list price.”

But patients can’t use their insurance to pay for drugs from TrumpRx, and prices on the site are unlikely to be lower than their co-pay. That’s something the website itself even acknowledges: “This is an out-of-pocket price,” it advises on each product page. “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first – it may be even lower.”

Insurance policies aren’t the only alternative to TrumpRx prices. The drugs offered on the new site are all branded – but not all of them need to be. Protonix, for example, is a proton pump inhibitor manufactured by Pfizer; used to treat heartburn and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), it’s available on TrumpRx for $200. But the same dosage in a generic version can be found on prescription discount website GoodRx for as little as $6.68.

And for that fairly small section of the public – fewer than one in six, per HHS – who lack prescription drug coverage and need brand-name meds, the reductions offered by TrumpRx may not be enough. After all, if you can’t afford insurance, you probably can’t afford more than $2,200 for an Ngenla pen each month, even if that price is half the retail listing.

“Even when you have very large discounts provided for brand-name drugs, they still end up with prices that are not really that affordable to the average person,” Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said at a November briefing hosted by health policy research group KFF, CNN reports. 

“We know from research that once a price goes above about $100 a month, that a lot of people stop filling their drugs at that price point,” she pointed out.

Many questions remaining

Let’s be clear: even now, with the website live, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this rollout. “Trump and RFK Jr. pledged ‘radical transparency.’ Instead, they’ve given us secret deals with drugmakers,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group, in a press release last month. Per the government, these lower prices are possible thanks to a negotiated three years of tariff relief for the drug companies – but no documents have been released to support that, and the details of any agreements have so far remained clandestine. 

“The secrecy makes it impossible to determine these deals’ effectiveness in lowering some drug prices,” Maybarduk said. “We need the texts so that we can understand how the deals will really affect Americans […] So today, we sued, asking the court to order the administration to make the deal texts public.”

Questions abound over which, if any, drugs will eventually join those already signed up to the scheme – and, once there, how long their lower prices will last. The site claims that in-person pharmacies can be used, but how and which ones are left unsaid. It’s not even totally clear that the TrumpRx program is actually legal: per a letter from Senate Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Peter Welch, and Richard J Durbin, sent January 29 to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, “we cannot be sure that TrumpRx will comply with existing federal laws.” 

Still, at a time when two-thirds of Americans are worried about their ability to afford healthcare for themselves and their families, many will hope that platforms like TrumpRx might help kick off a new era of lower cost medications. 

“For patients who want to access those medicines and don't really have an option or insurance […] it absolutely makes sense that they would shop around and find the best price available,” Rome told NPR. “Either from TrumpRx or GoodRx or Mark Cuban's website or […] Costco or many other different sites.”