By Michael Erman and Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday unveiled TrumpRx.gov, a website meant to offer consumers access to discounted prescription medicines and a central pillar of his efforts to lower drug prices in the United States.
Trump announced the new website was live at a White House event alongside Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and National Design Studio Director and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia.
“People are going to save a lot of money and be healthy,” Trump said.
Sixteen of the largest global drugmakers have struck “most-favored nation” deals with the Trump administration to cut drug prices for Americans in exchange for exemptions from U.S. tariffs. Under those agreements they will lower prices for the government’s Medicaid program and, via TrumpRx, to cash-paying consumers.
Those deals include agreements with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to slash the prices of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The government has said these would reduce prices to between $149 and $350 a month on average for Americans.
Novo and Lilly currently sell their weight-loss drugs directly to consumers, accounting for over 10% of total sales, the companies have said. Novo’s Wegovy pill, launched early last month, is currently being sold exclusively in direct-to-consumer channels as it waits on insurers to set coverage terms.
“We’re continuing to make it easier for people to access our authentic, FDA-approved medicines by expanding availability through multiple, convenient options,” said Chris Pernie, Novo’s associate vice president for U.S. public affairs.
“The launch of TrumpRx will further extend patients’ reach to Ozempic and Wegovy, including the newly approved Wegovy pill, at our self-pay prices,” Pernie said in a statement.
The website will be powered by prescription drug savings site GoodRx, according to STAT News. They reported that TrumpRx will not sell the drugs directly but rather send patients to other sites to buy the medicines.
SAVINGS UNCERTAIN
How much consumers will save is uncertain. The website is targeted at consumers looking to buy drugs without using insurance, meaning that most purchases would not count toward patients’ insurance deductibles.
“There is a real question about the value of this for people with insurance,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director for Medicare policy at health policy organization KFF. “In some cases, we could be looking at out-of-pocket costs that are still relatively unaffordable for a lot of people.”
U.S. patients currently pay far more for prescription medicines, often nearly three times more, than in other developed nations, and Trump has been pressuring drugmakers to lower U.S. prices to levels paid abroad.
Other drugmakers that have signed the deals include Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck and GSK.
Aside from the obesity drugs, medicines that will be available on the website include Merck’s diabetes drug Januvia, Sanofi’s blood thinner Plavix, GSK’s asthma inhaler Advair Diskus 500/50, Amgen’s cholesterol medication Repatha and Gilead’s hepatitis C treatment Epclusa.
Pfizer said it had launched its TrumpRx program on Thursday, adding in a statement that it would provide over 30 medicines at discounted prices.
The White House said other discounts include fertility medicines such as EMD Serono’s Gonal-F and Merck’s Cetrotide.
Although it is not immediately clear how effective the website would be in saving money for consumers, drugmakers stand to gain from its launch, said Cubanski.
“From the perspective of drug companies themselves, there’s a lot of upside to the direct-to-consumer approach. They can bypass insurance,” she said, “Selling a drug at a discount is better than no sale at all.”
“This shouldn’t be mistaken for a concerted effort to deliver lower drug prices across the board to people in the United States, even if there’s some value for some people.”
(Reporting by Michael Erman in New Jersey and Ahmed Aboulenein in Washington; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu, Katharine Jackson, and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Michelle Nichols, Andrea Ricci, Bill Berkrot and Stephen Coates)
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