President Donald Trump and the White House launched the Trump Rx website Thursday through which Americans can receive substantial discounts on prescription drugs.
Trump announced the launch of the site–where coupons are already available for 40 drugs, with more on the way–alongside Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz and U.S. Chief Design Officer of the National Design Studio Joe Gebbia in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“We’re here this evening to celebrate the launch of one of the most transformative healthcare initiatives of all time. There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. “Starting tonight, dozens of the most commonly used prescription drugs will be available at dramatic discounts for all consumers throughout a new website. It’s called trumprx.gov.”
Trump secured reduced drug prices by negotiating Most Favored Nation (MFN) deals with 14 major pharmaceutical companies between late September and December, including Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and Sanofi, on a wide range of medications.
The five companies that are currently offering prescription discounts on the website are AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer, the first five with whom he reached an agreement. Discounts through deals with other companies will become available on the website in the months ahead.
Gebbia offered a tutorial on how to navigate TrumpRx, which includes a search bar for prescriptions, and how Americans can take advantage of reduced costs by using coupons from the website at the pharmacy. He used the fertility drug Gonal-F as one example.
“So I type in Gonal-F, and I see it auto-completes. When I click on this, I have a beautiful page that shows the drug product, and right at the top, I see this is 83 percent off the original price,” he said.
“Now, how do I get this discount? I take this coupon, and I bring it to the pharmacy,” he explained. “I can print it out, I can add it to my wallet on my phone, whether that’s an Apple or an Android. I show it to the pharmacist, and I get the coupon credit right at the register.”
The original price of Gonal-F is $966.04, and after the coupon discount, the prescription is $168.00, per TrumpRx. The page for Gonal-F lists other drugs commonly prescribed with it, like Cetrotide and Ovidrel, and the discounts for these drugs are available with the Gonal-F coupon.
During the unveiling, the president emphasized the disparity in profits that pharmaceutical companies had been making from the United States compared to the rest of the world.
“Americans have long been paying the highest drug prices anywhere in the world, while other countries often pay pennies on the dollar for the exact same drugs,” he said. “We were essentially subsidizing the entire world and subsidizing by hundreds of billions of dollars every year.”
“The United States is just 4 percent of the world’s population and consumes only 13 percent of all prescription drugs. Yet, pharmaceutical companies have been making 75 percent from these drugs,” he added.
Trump said his MFN deals ensure “the United States will pay the lowest prices paid by any other country.”
The president used tariffs as a negotiating tool to leverage other nations to pay more for prescription drugs, thereby reducing costs for consumers in the United States.
The White House highlighted popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs as another example of where the president and his policies are passing savings onto consumers. Wegovy and Ozempic, made by Novo Nordisk, cost an average of $1,349 and $1,028 per month, respectively. Through TrumpRx, prices will fall to an average monthly cost of $350, or as low as $199 for lower-strength doses, the White House noted.
Read the full article here