How much will TrumpRx really cut down your drug costs?

President Trump on Thursday unveiled his lower-cost drug platform TrumpRx, touting it as “one of the most transformative health care initiatives of all time.”

“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times,” he added.

But health policy experts and consumer advocates are skeptical about how many people will benefit, and how significant the deals are.

The platform features coupons for 43 drugs, ranging from 33 to 93 percent off the list price and treating conditions for obesity, respiratory illnesses, infertility, bladder issues and menopause.

Several observers were quick to note that the advertised prices achievable with the coupons were still higher than the prices one might pay with insurance coverage.

“If you have insurance, your out-of-pocket costs are probably going to be less than the discounted list price that’s being advertised on TrumpRX,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, told The Hill.

“For people who are looking at this website and maybe they recognize a drug that they take, they really need to understand how their out-of-pocket cost under insurance would compare to the TrumpRx price.”

Cubanski noted, however, that some of the medications on TrumpRx aren’t well covered by insurance — such as weight loss and in vitro fertilization drugs, meaning a wider swathe of Americans may find savings on TrumpRx.

“It’s a valuable effort for some medications, for some people, and I think especially people who don’t have good coverage of some of these medications,” she said.

Notably, the offerings on TrumpRx are all branded versions of the drugs sold directly by drugmakers who’ve entered “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing agreements with the Trump administration.

Many of the medications listed on the website have generic alternatives available on the market at significantly lower prices.

Protonix, a branded medication made by Pfizer that reduces stomach acid, is advertised as having a 55 percent discount on TrumpRx, taking the medication from $447.28 to $200.10 for 30 tablets at a strength of 20 mg.

But according to GoodRx, its generic equivalent, pantoprazole, can be bought for $10.47 for the same number of tablets at the same dosage with the coupon it offers. Without the coupon, the cost is estimated at just less than $80.

Another Pfizer product, Tikosyn, for an irregular heartbeat, is shown to have a 50 percent discounted price of $336 for 60 0.125 mg capsules. Generic Tikosyn, dofetilide, is shown to be available for $23.06 on GoodRx with a standard coupon, signifying a 94 percent discount from the $373.96 cost.

Generics currently make up the majority of prescription medications taken in the U.S., with the Food and Drug Administration estimating in 2023 that 91 percent of prescriptions are filled as generics.

Anthony Wright, executive director of FamiliesUSA, a nonpartisan consumer health advocacy group, dismissed TrumpRx as a “trumped-up catalog of coupons.”

“This is not actually lowering drug prices. It steers consumers to the existing drug company programs for uninsured patients that have been around for a while,” said Wright. “This is pretty limited in terms of both who it effects, what drugs it offers and what the benefits are, especially compared to what already existed previously.”

Ashish Jha, who served as the Biden administration’s White House COVID-19 response coordinator, did not share that skepticism. He called TrumpRx a “good thing” that “is going to be really, really helpful for people who don’t have health insurance” in remarks to The Hill’s sister network NewsNation.

TrumpRx.gov explicitly states that people on government health plans such as Medicaid are ineligible to use the coupons.

The prohibition on federal health plan enrollees from using TrumpRx coupons likely has to do with the anti-kickback statute in the U.S., which criminalizes willfully offering or exchanging anything of value for reimbursable items through federal programs like Medicaid.

The Hill has reached out to the Trump administration for clarity on whether all private health insurance enrollees can use TrumpRx coupons.

But even if this cohort can access the coupons, the scope of TrumpRx appears to be “quite limited in scale,” according to Yunan Ji, assistant professor of strategy at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business.

“It really only applies to cash-pay patients. So, just considering the scale is cash-pay patients we’re thinking about, you know, a percent of the uninsured, plus some of the people who may be underinsured because their insurance coverage may be limited, but the scope is quite limited at the moment,” she said.

Roughly 8 percent of the U.S. is uninsured, and with its current offering of just 43 drugs, TrumpRx currently stands to benefit a small subset of that population. Administration officials said more medication would be added in the coming weeks.

“The thing about MFN in general — so this is interesting, because MFN is something I teach my MBA students — is that actually, in the long run, it actually puts upward pricing pressure,” said Ji.

Trump’s signature drug price policy requires countries to sell drugs in the U.S. at least as cheaply as they are offered in other countries.

When companies are aware that their clients, like the U.S., are expecting MFN pricing, they may set their initial launch prices of new drugs at an elevated level, Ji said. Another outcome of MFN pricing could be that drug launches in other countries with strict pricing regulations will be delayed.

Trump acknowledged the global impact that his MFN pricing policy could have on other countries when announcing the launch of TrumpRx.

“Drug prices in other nations will go up by doing this, they had to agree,” he said. “In many cases, the drug costs will go up by double and even triple for them, but they’re going way down for the United States.”

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