President Trump and top federal health officials have repeatedly claimed that their new website, TrumpRx, offers Americans the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs.
“I took prescription drugs, a very big part of health care, from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest,” Mr. Trump said during his State of the Union address last month.
That is not true, according to a review by The New York Times and the German news organizations Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR.
The drugs listed on TrumpRx can cost American patients up to hundreds or thousands of dollars, while a patient walking into a German pharmacy pays next to nothing. The German health system foots the bill, and records show that, more often than not, it pays less than what the Trump administration negotiated for Americans.
The TrumpRx website shows the prices that the administration negotiated for a few dozen of the several thousand prescription medications in the United States. The list includes almost none of the most widely used drugs, like statins, or ultraexpensive drugs like cancer therapies.
Some well-known drugs on the list are Xeljanz, for autoimmune conditions, and Farxiga, for diabetes and heart and kidney problems. Both are cheaper in Germany, a rare example of a country that makes its negotiated drug prices public.
The biggest names on TrumpRx are two blockbuster weight-loss drugs — Wegovy and Zepbound. Both are available for lower out-of-pocket prices at pharmacies in wealthy countries around the world. In some cases, Americans pay about twice as much as patients overseas.
The review by The Times and its German partners is an assessment of one of Mr. Trump’s signature domestic issues. With gas prices rising because of the unpopular war in Iran, the president is counting on his drug policy to resonate with voters who are concerned about affordability. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that this policy alone should be enough to carry Republicans to victory in November’s midterm elections.
Our analysis shows that with some drugs, Mr. Trump appears to have modestly narrowed the gap between European and U.S. prices. But the gap persists, and the reality does not match his hyperbole. That is particularly true for patent-protected drugs, which consistently were cheaper in Germany.
White House officials and pharmaceutical companies contested our findings. They argued that the gap disappears after adjusting for the economic conditions in every country. That means that TrumpRx prices can count as cheaper, even when the price is higher.
The administration did not provide enough detail about how it ran those numbers for that claim to be checked. We examined raw numbers, comparing prices in U.S. dollars.
“By any objective measure, no president has accomplished what President Trump has in the past year alone to lower prescription drug prices for American patients,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said.
Mr. Trump has long complained that Americans pay too much for medicines while Europeans pay too little. The president diagnosed a real disparity: Brand-name drugs in the United States have been shown to be three times as expensive, on average, as those in other wealthy nations.
The varying prices reflect negotiations between drugmakers and governments. Drugmakers charge more when they have stronger leverage. Some countries, like those in Europe, are more willing to deny their citizens a drug if the price is too high.
In recent months, the Trump administration struck price deals with 16 major drugmakers. The TrumpRx website is most likely to benefit patients who do not have insurance coverage for their drug or have insurance plans that would subject them to high out-of-pocket costs.
To test Mr. Trump’s claims, The Times and its partners conducted two analyses.
First, we compared TrumpRx prices with those paid by the national health insurance system in Germany. That gave us a uniquely direct comparison in an industry where prices are often kept secret.
Second, we visited pharmacies in eight cities around the world to compare prices for Wegovy and Zepbound. Because patients typically pay out of pocket, without insurance, for these weight-loss drugs, this gave us another apples-to-apples comparison.
Here’s what we found.
German prices beat those on TrumpRx more often than not.
German patients typically pay a small fee (capped at 10 euros, or about $11.50) for prescription drugs. That’s because, like most wealthy countries, Germany covers most drugs through its public health system.
From the research institute of the major insurance provider AOK, we obtained the prices that the health system pays for each drug.
We were able to directly compare 24 of the 43 drugs initially listed on TrumpRx. Germany’s prices were lower in more than half the cases, at least.
The difference was most pronounced when it came to the six patent-protected drugs on the list. The German price was consistently cheaper, sometimes by a lot. American parents using TrumpRx, for example, would pay $2,700 more each month for Ngenla, a hormone treatment for children with stunted growth.
Generic drugs seemed to fare better under TrumpRx. Ten of the 18 drugs on the list that have lost patent protection appeared to be more expensive in Germany. (That count may be overly favorable to TrumpRx because generics typically are sold with undisclosed discounts in Germany. If those discounts are big enough, they might yield prices that are lower than those on TrumpRx.)
Abrilada, which is similar to Humira, a treatment for autoimmune conditions, is one example in which TrumpRx appeared to offer a much better deal. The TrumpRx price for an Abrilada injection pen is $500 less than the listed German price, before discounts. Pfizer, the drug’s manufacturer, declined to comment on the German price but praised TrumpRx generally.
For obesity drugs, Japanese shoppers win.
When the White House talks about the lowest prices in “the world,” it’s really talking about those in eight wealthy countries.
White House officials said that they negotiated the TrumpRx prices by comparing them with those in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, Switzerland and Denmark.
So we visited pharmacies in those countries to check the out-of-pocket prices for obesity medications.
U.S. prices for these drugs have plummeted in recent months, thanks in part to Mr. Trump’s deals with the manufacturers. As recently as the summer of 2024, many Americans were paying about $1,000 a month for Zepbound. Now they can pay less than half that.
But that doesn’t make them the world’s cheapest. Prices varied depending on dose and pharmacy, but TrumpRx prices were consistently among the most expensive. Japan’s were consistently the cheapest.
Misty Fuller, a spokeswoman for Eli Lilly, which makes Zepbound, said comparing out-of-pocket prices across countries created a “skewed portrayal.” She said that prices must be adjusted for each country’s economy. “A dollar goes further in some countries than others,” she said. “A medicine isn’t necessarily cheaper abroad if wages and living costs are lower there.”
Liz Skrbkova, a spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy, said that “comparing U.S. drug prices to those in other countries ignores vast differences in health-care systems.”
Ameet Sarpatwari, a Harvard Medical School researcher who studies pharmaceutical policy and reviewed our findings, said they showed the need for greater pricing transparency.
“The claim that the Trump administration is making that Americans are getting the best deal is clearly false,” Dr. Sarpatwari said. “It is very easy to mislead the public about drug costs.”
Reporting was contributed by Vjosa Isai from Toronto; Lisa Abend from Copenhagen; Ana Castelain from Marseille, France; Josephine de La Bruyère from Rome; Kiuko Notoya from Tokyo; Theresa Rauffmann from Basel, Switzerland; and Chloe W. Shakin from London.
Methodology: TrumpRx went live with 43 drugs. We found 24 equivalent drugs for comparison on the AOK price list. For generics, we used the listed German price, independent of discounts. This ensured the analysis would be, if anything, overly generous to Mr. Trump’s claims. In cases where drugs were sold in different quantities, we scaled German prices to reflect the U.S. quantity. Separately, during the week of Feb. 23, reporters visited pharmacies in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, Switzerland and Denmark. At each, we requested 11 out-of-pocket prices for the five dose levels of Wegovy (0.25 milligrams, 0.5 mg, 1 mg, 1.7 mg and 2.4 mg) and the six dose levels of Zepbound (2.5 mg, 5 mg, 7.5 mg, 10 mg, 12.5 mg and 15 mg). Dosing is standardized. No scaling was required. (As an extra caution, we removed an outlier Swiss pharmacy where prices were much lower than the other Swiss prices.) We made no adjustments for economic performance; the only adjustment was to convert currencies to U.S. dollars.
Rebecca Robbins is a Times reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
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