“Find the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs.” That is the promise of TrumpRx, the new website unveiled on Friday, February 6, by the White House to provide American patients with a selection of discounted treatments, displayed in bold letters on the platform’s homepage. Announced in September, the initiative aims to symbolize the administration’s yearlong efforts to lower healthcare costs in the United States.
The launch of the website, which features discounts ranging from 33% to 93%, followed a series of confidential agreements reached in recent months between Washington and 17 major pharmaceutical companies worldwide. The pharmaceutical groups committed, among other things, to selling some of their products directly at prices significantly below the standard rates for patients paying out of pocket, that is, without any reimbursement from their health insurance. Serving as a platform connecting patients and pharmaceutical companies, TrumpRx is ultimately expected to consolidate all the offers made available by each drug manufacturer.
Donald Trump has made the development of direct-to-consumer sales one of the pillars of his strategy to lower drug prices. The US president sees expanding this sales channel as a way for pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices by bypassing pharmacy benefit managers, whom he accused of driving up costs.
However, there are doubts in the US about the success of the initiative. Despite the steep discounts, the platform’s appeal could be limited for most Americans, who already have health insurance that helps minimize out-of-pocket expenses. “If you have insurance, check your copay first – it could be even lower,” TrumpRx warns on its website.
Destroys best currently available option for health care
Starts amazon.com for drugs
Not even Amazon - it’s a cheap, travelocity-ass frontend for showing the cheapest existing prices already available. The administration has, admittedly, claimed that they’ve made deals with pharmaceutical companies to make some of their drugs available for as cheaply as they are already available in other countries. But, as the AP notes,
Many of the details of Trump’s deals with manufacturers remain unclear , and drug prices for patients in the U.S. can depend on many factors, including the competition a treatment faces and insurance coverage. Most people have coverage through work, the individual insurance market or government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which shield them from much of the cost. https://apnews.com/article/trumprx-website-trump-drug-prices-pharmaceuticals-eae897ebf87349510a7795035a3043a3
So if you’re looking for a meaningful, long-term solution to one of the U.S.'s greatest healthcare deficiencies, the administration would like to interest you in this service they constructed with all the forethought and durability of a child’s cardboard lemonade stand.
The saddest thing is if this government run pharmacy was under a far more competent administration there would not be skepticism among the wider public, and maybe lower drug prices for real.
Sadistic sociopath who abhors poor people offers medicine for only poor people. What could possibly go wrong?
Sure it’s just chalk pressed into the shape of a pill, but it was cheap.
My bet is some sort of industrial waste.
Yeah I mean, chalk, rat poison, industrial waste. Whatever’s cheapest that day.
When previous presidents named their healthcare supports after themselves, like Obamacare, it was portrayed as an alternate name to the official title, and clearly tried to keep things bipartisan. TrumpRX sounds like he’s personally making money off this new platform.
Obama didn’t name it Obamacare. Republicans called it that in the hopes that it would make people think it was bad.
The ACA was never officially called Obamacare. Right wing pundits just repeatedly called it that until everyone called it that.
