TrumpRx.gov, powered by GoodRx, will offer discounts on major drugs including weight-loss treatments, targeting uninsured and cash-paying consumers.
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump will unveil a new website, TrumpRx.gov, on Thursday to offer consumers discounted prescription medicines.
The website is a central pillar of the administration’s efforts to lower US drug prices. Trump will announce the initiative at a White House event alongside officials and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia.
Sixteen major global drugmakers have struck deals with the administration to cut prices. These “most-favored nation” agreements grant companies exemptions from US tariffs in exchange for lowering prices for Medicaid and, via TrumpRx, for cash-paying consumers.
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The deals include agreements with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to slash prices of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. The government states this would reduce prices to between USD 149 and USD 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. Novo’s recently launched Wegovy pill is being sold exclusively through direct-to-consumer channels.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the “state of the art” website “will save millions of Americans money.” The website will be powered by the prescription drug savings platform GoodRx.
TrumpRx will not sell drugs directly but will instead send patients to other sites to purchase medicines. The platform is targeted at consumers looking to buy drugs without using insurance.
This means most purchases would not count toward patients’ insurance deductibles. How much consumers will ultimately save remains uncertain.
“There is a real question about the value of this for people with insurance,” said Juliette Cubanski of 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.”
US patients currently pay nearly three times more for prescription medicines than in other developed nations. Trump has pressured drugmakers to lower US prices to levels paid abroad.
Other drugmakers that have signed the deals include Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck and GSK. Available medicines will include Merck’s diabetes drug Januvia and GSK’s asthma inhaler Advair.
