The White House has struck a deal with the health entrepreneur and billionaire Mark Cuban to feature hundreds of generic drugs on TrumpRx.
It’s a broad expansion for the president’s drug discount website, which had listed just several dozen medications since its launch earlier this year — until now, all of them brand name. In most cases, however, customers seeking generic drugs will be routed to Cost Plus Drugs, the online pharmacy Cuban founded in 2022, or other similar discount companies.
“Consumers will now have one source to ensure they’re getting the lowest-possible cost on their prescriptions,” Trump said at a White House press conference Monday.
The president touts TrumpRx, a website that relies heavily on online commercial pharmacies, as his solution to the high drug costs besetting American consumers. It doesn’t directly sell medications but instead offers coupons consumers can bring to their pharmacies or redirects them directly to manufacturer websites.
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Officials said Monday that more than 600 generic medications will be listed on TrumpRx.
Most of the drugs on the website can be purchased for similar prices at other online pharmacies. And the website doesn’t interact with health insurance plans, which are the primary way most Americans get their medications.
The Trump administration did negotiate lower prices for some GLP-1 weight-loss medications and fertility drugs. Officials also struck deals with more than a dozen drug manufacturers to participate in the website and offer discounts to Medicaid. Still, some of those manufacturers increased prices on some of their other drugs this year.
Drug analysts said the addition of a broad set of generics — which represent 90% of all drugs in the United States — makes TrumpRx more useful to the average consumer.
“You’re taking TrumpRx’s relevance to the consumer and multiplying it exponentially,” said Antonio Ciaccia, the CEO of the drug pricing transparency firm 46 Brooklyn Research.
“TrumpRx is now the true single source of truth for the lowest prices for American families on their prescription medications,” said Chris Klomp, the chief counselor at the Department of Health and Human Services who negotiated the deals with pharmaceutical companies.
The platform is supported by GoodRx, the largest drug discount platform in the country which provides people with coupons to buy branded drugs at pharmacies.
Democrats have slammed the website, saying it doesn’t offer unique benefits to Americans. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has called TrumpRx a “glorified coupon book.” The absence of generics on the initial website was a big source of concern for Democrats, who said that Americans could find cheaper prices outside the White House’s initiative.On its face, this deal with Cost Plus Drugs does address some of those worries — though Democrats like Wyden have pushed for different policies to lower costs, like expanding Medicare’s authority to negotiate drug pricing.
The administration also announced a new tool on the website where people can search for individual pharmacies and a partnership with Amazon Pharmacy.
The White House’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report earlier this month projecting the drug deals struck by the administration would save $529 billion over the next decade.
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