Can TrumpRx really lower drug prices?

Call him the Pharmacist-in-Chief. President Donald Trump last week announced the launch of “TrumpRx,” a website where Americans will be able to find discounted medicine, part of a “sweeping deal” with Pfizer to offer lower-priced drugs to the public.

Pfizer will highlight many of its brand-name drugs at a 50% discount on the new website, said CNN. (The site will not “sell or distribute medications” but instead will let users find their meds and then be “redirected to manufacturers’ direct-to-consumer channels.”) The move ends “price gouging at the expense of American families,” Trump said. The company said it will also expand its American manufacturing, part of a broader deal in which it gets a “three-year reprieve on certain tariffs on pharmaceutical imports,” CNN said. But experts are not sure if the discounts will mean much to most Americans, who “often depend on insurance coverage” to pay for their prescriptions.

“Meaningfully cutting U.S. drug prices can be difficult,” said The Washington Post. American officials last year negotiated lower prices for 10 of Medicare’s most expensive drugs, but the costs remained “twice as high as those in European and other comparable countries.” Any attempt to push prices still lower “must overcome the political might of the pharmaceutical companies,” which are armed with one of America’s “best-funded Washington lobbying machines.”

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What did the commentators say?

“The problem is not greedy pharma firms,” said The Economist. American prescription drugs are costly for reasons found “further along the supply chain.” Most “excess profits” on medicines are taken by “hospitals, and middlemen, such as insurers, distributors and pharmacy-benefit managers.” If America threatens drugmaker profits, those companies will “take fewer risks on innovation.” Trump’s cure for high prices, then, is “worse than the disease.”

“Why does the federal government need to become a drug marketer?” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. While TrumpRx will sell drugs like Xeljanz, Zavzpret and Eucrisa, the truth is that most Americans “pay far less out-of-pocket for medicines using their insurance cards” and that spending “accounts for a mere 1% of U.S. healthcare spending.” Rather than being a solution, TrumpRx “looks like a political branding exercise.”

Trump’s new website is a “pretend solution” for high drug prices, said The American Prospect. The administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” included a provision that protects “certain high-cost drugs” from Medicare’s price negotiations, and thus “protect several billion dollars” in drugmaker profits. This means TrumpRx will offer “select discounts for a few while keeping the real price the same.”

What next?

Pfizer’s deal with Trump “caused an uproar within much of the pharmaceutical industry,” said Axios. The announcement puts pressure on other drugmakers to “fall in line” after “months of unified resistance” to Trump’s demands for lower prices. The president expects some of those companies to “make deals in the coming weeks” to offer lower prices or else face higher tariffs.

But the deal was “far less punishing” than the industry expected, said Reuters. The result? Stocks for pharmaceutical companies rose after Trump’s announcement.