President Donald Trump has for months pledged to tackle rising health care costs with a new government-backed online source for prescription drugs bearing his name. But is the eponymously-branded website everything he promised?
The long-awaited project, dubbed “TrumpRx,” went live on Thursday, with Trump claiming that it “represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close” alongside Medicare administrator (and ex-TV doctor) Mehmet Oz and AirBnb founder turned U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia.
Much of what the portal offers is focused on weight-loss-enabling GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro — or as Trump likes to call them, ‘the fat drugs.”
Trump was followed by Oz — who traded a career as a celebrated cardio-thoracic surgeon for one as a medical show host and product pitchman before making an ill-fated turn into GOP politics as a candidate for the Pennsylvania senate seat currently held by John Fetterman. Oz returned to his medical showman roots while talking up the “discounted, steeply discounted prices” available on the TrumpRx site before Gebbia took over the ‘As Seen On TV’-like pitch to show how the site worked.
It was a made-for-television launch that was equal parts presidential address and late-night infomercial.
But wait, there’s more!
Another reason why Americans who watch significant amounts of television may have seen something eerily familiar in what Gebbia demonstrated: Instead of the direct-to-consumer portal teased by the president and his aides since last summer, the former exec explained how the TrumpRx site permitted users to search for particular drugs to see if manufacturer coupons were offered, then add any such coupons to their phones before taking the coupons to their local pharmacist.
“Americans for the first time, are getting the lowest cost price drugs like the rest of the world is,” Gebbia said.
Yet despite the former tech executive’s boasts, Thursday’s launch was not the first time Americans could get access to a coupon that promises lower prices after checking on a centralized website.
In fact, anyone who spends any amount of time watching linear television is bombarded with advertisements touting similar websites such as GoodRx or SingleCare — with the latter employing former fictional president Martin Sheen (The West Wing’s Josiah Bartlett) as a pitchman.
And what’s more, those non-government sites offer far more medications than the TrumpRx site does — in addition to the same prices for the medications currently offered on the administration’s website.
For example, the TrumpRx website says consumers can purchase a two-month supply of Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 injection, Wegovy, for $199 per month at the two lowest-available doses.
That’s the same price offered through Novo Nordisk’s own “Novocare” website, and through GoodRx — because (according to a press release) the TrumpRx website is actually a rebranded version of GoodRx pursuant to an agreement under which GoodRx will serve as a “core integration partner” for TrumpRx.
Moreover, those prices touted by Trump, Oz and Gebbia on Thursday aren’t set in stone. That $199 rate is only possible because Novo Nordisk is offering a discount — and that discount expires at the end of next month.
By April, consumers using the same coupons for Wegovy will have to pay $349 per month for the same medication, nearly twice the price touted by the Trump administration.
And to add insult to injury, the prices at issue are only available for those Americans who don’t have prescription coverage through their health insurance, which means those who do have insurance remain at the mercy of any agreements between their insurers, drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers when it comes to pricing.
The apparent bait-and-switch nature of the Trump administration’s latest project was met with derision from Democrats in Congress, including Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden of Oregon, who said in a statement that there “is no greater fraud than Donald J. Trump when it comes to lower drug prices.”
His colleague, Sen. Pete Welch, of Vermont, said Trump “loves to talk a big game and make promises to working families about lowering prescription drug prices” while his administration “has done nothing” to address health care costs that have skyrocketed because he allowed ACA premium tax credits to expire at the end of last year.
“All he’s done is kicked people off their health insurance … families and businesses have been left holding the bag,” Welch said.
New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking member on the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee, called the TrumpRx project “a textbook example of the ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ Republicans in Congress claim they want to eliminate.”
“This fly by night platform not only threatens patients’ health, safety, and privacy, but also likely includes kickback schemes designed to enrich President Trump, his family, and their friend,” he said.
But one of Pallone’s former colleagues, ex-New Jersey congressman Rob Andrews, was willing to offer at least some praise for the administration’s efforts — with a few caveats.
Andrews, a Democrat who was one of the original authors of the Affordable Care Act, told The Independent the TrumpRx concept was a positive one because it could induce “more competition and therefore better prices in the pharmaceutical industry.”
But at the same time, Andrews stressed that the concept “has to be expanded to be meaningful” by inducing the same sorts of cost reductions for drugs purchased by people using their commercial health insurance.
“I would also like to see a way that employers could help their employees take advantage of the portal, because when you get to expensive drugs, most people aren’t going to use them unless or buy them unless their insurance plan covers them,” he said.
“Opening up a portal and saying that someone can then access to better drug pricing … might work, but the underlying problem is all of the people in the supply chain between the maker of the drug and the user of the drug — the patient — who take money.”
Michael Botta, a Harvard-trained health care economist who co-founded the health care technology startup SesameCare, also told The Independent that the TrumpRx project, though limited in scope, could still make a dent in families’ prescription costs, which currently make up around 14 percent of Americans’ total health care costs.
He also said Trump deserves credit for “using the bully pulpit” to browbeat pharmaceutical manufacturers into lowering prices, even if only for a limited number of customers paying cash prices with the coupons obtained on the website.
“I think there’s real opportunity there to help people realize that there are actual alternative channels where you can save money relative to your health insurance, or even, obviously, relative to paying cash, just accepting the price that they give you at the pharmacy. And in general, that’s a good thing,” he said.
