The Trump administration is planning to unveil a website on Thursday evening to help American patients use their own money to buy prescription drugs directly from drugmakers.
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said in a post on X that Mr. Trump would hold an event at 7 p.m. to debut the website. She claimed that millions of Americans would save money using the site, though researchers who study drug pricing warned that some Americans could overpay if they use it.
The government website, TrumpRx.gov, will not sell drugs. Instead, it is meant to be an entry point where consumers can search for their medicines and then navigate to websites offered by major manufacturers to buy medication directly. Patients still need a prescription.
The TrumpRx site is expected to feature dozens of medicines, including well-known and widely used products like Wegovy and Zepbound, for weight loss, and Humira, for conditions like arthritis. The prices on the site are expected to vary widely: A month’s supply of the blood thinner Plavix is expected to cost $16, while the hepatitis C treatment Epclusa is expected to be $2,425.
It is not clear how health insurance will work through TrumpRx. Some manufacturers’ direct-buy programs allow people to pay using their health insurance.
It is also unclear how many consumers will save money by using it. Nearly all of the drugs expected to be on the site are already widely covered through insurance, and some are available as inexpensive generics from competing manufacturers. A person who has low out-of-pocket costs for their drug through their insurance could waste hundreds of dollars a year paying with their own money through TrumpRx.
“There may be patients who think this is a good deal and then end up financially worse off,” said Rachel Sachs, a law professor who studies drug pricing at Washington University in St. Louis.
There are some circumstances in which a patient might benefit from using TrumpRx, experts said. People who lack insurance coverage for a medicine and can’t switch to a suitable covered alternative may find a better price on the president’s website than if they walked into a pharmacy, though experts recommended first checking a price-comparison website like GoodRx.
A few of the drugs expected to be offered on the site, for obesity and infertility, are often not covered through insurance, so patients often must pay for them using their own money.
Because of that, patients have flocked to the manufacturers’ direct-buy sites for obesity drugs. About 1 million patients have used Eli Lilly’s site, which sells Zepbound, since it went live two years ago, according to the company.
Novo Nordisk says that 30 percent of patients who take Wegovy injections now buy the medication using their own money.
Rebecca Robbins is a Times reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
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