WASHINGTON, D.C. (WZMQ) — President Donald Trump recently unveiled a new plan to reduce prescription prices for Americans.
There are several components to this plan. One of them is a new government website called TrumpRx.gov. The site will serve as a portal to help patients find cheaper options. Trump says it could help bring down prescription costs by hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars every month.
Following an executive order in April aimed at bringing down drug prices, President Trump, in July, sent over a dozen letters to leading drugmakers urging them to cut prices.
Within the past three weeks, both Pfizer and AstraZeneca struck deals with the White House, becoming the first two companies to pledge steep drug discounts. In exchange for lowering costs, the drugmakers will see relief on recent tariffs imposed by the U.S.
“I think for the first time, we’re seeing pharmaceutical companies now really complying and trying to work with the administration to make some meaningful movement in the right direction,” said Dr. William Soliman, founder and CEO of the Accreditation Council for Medical Affairs.
The companies will sell certain drugs to Medicaid at a similar price offered to other wealthy countries and have agreed to participate in TrumpRx. Dr. William Soliman says it’s too early to measure the impact, but he predicts Medicaid recipients and those taking brand-name drugs will see the biggest savings.
“Eighty percent of drugs in America that are prescribed are generic drugs. And for those individuals, this is not going to make much of a difference,” Soliman said. “Where this is going to make a big difference is for those small numbers of branded drugs.”
“TrumpRx really is mostly going to be for Medicaid patients. How this is going to pan out for patients that have Medicare or patients that are commercially insured, that remains to be seen,” he added.
Advocates who want to see more transparency within the prescription drug supply chain say, based on early predictions, TrumpRx doesn’t address the root problem.
“Our system’s addiction to discounts and rebates stands in the way of a focus that actually can bring down the sticker prices of those medicines, thus lowering the risk and the cost exposure that incurs to patients and employers and government programs,” said Antonio Ciaccia, president of 3 Axis Advisors and an expert in drug pricing and the pharmaceutical supply chain process.
Ciaccia says the supply chain, as is, fails to incentivize manufacturers of brand drugs to compete by lowering prices. Instead, he says “we have a system of bloated prices and massive discounts that roll off the top that unfortunately don’t always make their way to the end payer at the pharmacy counter.”
Ciaccia says the premise of TrumpRx is to bypass the plumbing of the current system and to create a new highway where brand drugs and their discounts can make their way to the end consumer
“So, in a way, it doesn’t fix the brokenness of our system. It tries to create a pathway around it,” Ciaccia said.
For example, Xeljanz, an arthritis medication that can cost $6,000 a month, could drop to $3,600. It’s a large discount, but still a large price.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s a nothing-burger, right? It just means that it’s, at the very best, planting seeds for what could be something that is better. But as it stands today, it is very limited in terms of its scope, thus limited in its impact,” Ciaccia said.
Ciaccia credits the Trump administration for pointing out the United States suffers from the most inflated costs for brand drugs in the world. However, he notes that if the list price is the problem, then policy solutions should be directly targeted at list prices.
“I’d like to see policies, solutions that incentivize manufacturers to lower their prices rather than come up with pathways around a broken system that deprives the end payer of the massive amount of discounts flowing through the system,” Ciaccia said.
The White House says more deals are on the way — and if it works, more than 100 million Americans could benefit. The TrumpRx.gov website is expected to launch in early 2026.
Experts say it may not be a cure-all for high drug prices, but that it could give some patients much-needed relief at the pharmacy.
“At the end of the day, it’s better than what we had before, which are higher prices that were making it very difficult to get these branded products that patients needed,” Soliman said.
