How TrumpRx works

President Donald Trump was joined by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz on Thursday to announce the launch of TrumpRx, with Trump saying the site is "the biggest thing to happen in healthcare, I think, in many, many decades."

"We were essentially subsidizing the entire world and subsidizing by hundreds of billions of dollars every year," Trump said. "The United States is just 4% of the world's population and consumes only 13% of all prescription drugs. Yet pharmaceutical companies have been making 75% from these drugs. Think of it. 75% of the money they made came from the United States."

The site currently features a collection of 43 prescription drugs treating a variety of conditions, with discounts ranging from 33% off for Pfizer's Xeljanz, which treats autoimmune disorders like ulcerative colitis, to 93% off EMD Serono's Cetrotide, which is used in fertility treatments.

Drugs cannot be purchased directly from TrumpRx. Rather, customers must click a button stating they aren't enrolled in a government insurance program like Medicare and won't seek insurance reimbursement for out-of-pocket costs or count them toward a deductible.

Then, consumers receive a coupon that they take to a pharmacy for a discount on their prescription. "I take this coupon and I bring it to the pharmacy. I can print it out. I can add it to my wallet on my phone, whether it's an Apple or an Android," said Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb who joined the Trump administration last year as chief design officer. "I show it to the pharmacist, and I get the coupon credit right at the register."

Some drugs, however, require consumers to go directly to a drugmaker's website.

The TrumpRx website also identifies which drugs are commonly prescribed alongside the medication that someone is receiving a coupon for, including a list of pharmacies that carry it.

In a statement Thursday, telemedicine platform GoodRx announced it would be a "key integration partner" for pharmaceutical companies looking to offer their products through TrumpRx.

"At launch, GoodRx is the integrated pricing source for Pfizer, including over 30 of Pfizer's essential brand medications, along with other leading pharmaceutical manufacturers. Additional manufacturer integrations are expected to follow," the company said.

"And for the vast majority of people, it's going to continue to be less expensive for patients to purchase their medicines using their insurance than it is to pay cash prices for the medicines, even if those cash prices are highly discounted below the manufacturer prices."

The TrumpRx website acknowledges that, for people with insurance, co-pays are likely to be cheaper than cash prices, saying in summaries of the savings by drug: "This is an out-of-pocket price. If you have insurance, check your co-pay first — it may be even lower."

"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," said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF. "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."

However, for those whose drugs aren't covered by insurance, TrumpRx and other cash-pay discounts could help, Rome said.

"So for those types of medicines, there is a market for patients who want to access those medicines and don't really have an option or insurance," he said. "And for them, it absolutely makes sense that they would shop around and find the best price available, either from TrumpRx or GoodRx or Mark Cuban's website or … Costco or many other different sites."

All the drugs listed on TrumpRx are branded versions of the drugs sold directly from the drugmakers who entered "most favored nation" pricing agreements with the Trump administration. However, many of those medications have generic alternatives that are available at significantly lower prices.

For example, Protonix, a branded medication from Pfizer that reduces stomach acid, is advertised as having a 55% discount on TrumpRx, marking the medication down from $447.28 to $200.10 for 30 tablets at a strength of 20 mg. But according to GoodRx, the generic equivalent of Protonix, pantoprazole, can be purchased for $10.47 for the same number of tablets and the same dosage with the coupon it offers. Without the coupon, the cost is estimated to be just below $80.

Yunan Ji, an assistant professor of strategy at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, said that even for the cohort of consumers who can access coupons on TrumpRx, the scope of the stie appears to be "quite limited in scale."

"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.

Anthony Wright, executive director of FamiliesUSA, a nonpartisan consumer health advocacy group, said that TrumpRx is 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," he said. "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."

*Advisory Board is a subsidiary of Optum. All Advisory Board research, expert perspectives, and recommendations remain independent.