President Trump announced the debut of a website on Thursday night to help Americans use their own money to buy prescription drugs.
The government website, TrumpRx.gov, will not sell medications. Instead, it provides an entry point for consumers to search for their drugs and then buy them elsewhere, either from pharmacies or websites offered by major manufacturers to buy medications directly.
Mr. Trump and two administration officials unveiled the site at an event in an auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is adjacent to the White House. Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, predicted that the offering of fertility drugs would lead to a boom in “Trump babies.”
The president talked up the site as a way for Americans to get the lowest prices. “We’re going to save a lot of money and be healthy,” he promised.
Mr. Trump has struck a series of deals with major drugmakers, promoting his efforts to lower drug prices at a time when Democrats try to use the issues of affordability and the cost of living against him heading into the midterm elections. The president persuaded the companies to reduce some prices and return production to the states, in exchange for avoiding his threatened tariffs on drugs made in other countries.
But researchers who study drug pricing warned that many people would pay too much if they use TrumpRx.
The TrumpRx site features 43 medicines, including well-known and widely used products like insulin; inhalers; the popular weight-loss drugs, Wegovy and Zepbound; and a copycat version of Humira, used for conditions like arthritis. The prices on the site vary widely: A month’s supply of Cytomel, a pill for thyroid problems, costs $6, while a high dose of Ngenla, a hormone treatment for children with a condition that stunts their growth, costs more than $5,500.
It is unlikely that many consumers will save money by using TrumpRx. Nearly all of the drugs 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 a drug through insurance could waste hundreds of dollars a year paying out-of-pocket through TrumpRx. Each product page on the site advises consumers: “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first — it may be even lower.”
About 85 percent of Americans have drug coverage, according to a 2024 survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“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. She was an adviser on prescription drug policy in the Biden administration.
At least initially, people would not be able to use their insurance through TrumpRx, though it directs people to some manufacturer sites that allow patients to use their coverage.
TrumpRx also gives people the option of using in-person pharmacies, though it is not clear how many pharmacies will participate. Pages feature a coupon — stylized with a golden eagle clutching a TrumpRx banner in its claws — that people can print out or pull up on their phones to present at a pharmacy counter. The coupon lists “MAHA” as its group identification code, a reference to the administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
The Trump administration is piggybacking on the popularity of manufacturers’ direct-buy offerings for obesity drugs, which are often not covered through insurance. Since its introduction two years ago, about one million people have used Eli Lilly’s site, which sells Zepbound, according to the company. Novo Nordisk says that 30 percent of people on Wegovy now buy it without using insurance, either through the company’s website or another direct-buy method, like getting it at Costco.
Absent from TrumpRx are many of the most expensive medicines that cause the most financial pain for employers, government programs and patients. Cancer drugs often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and are generally covered by insurance with varying out-of-pocket costs, and are far too expensive for almost all Americans to buy themselves.
“TrumpRx is a side show,” Sean D. Sullivan, a health economist at the University of Washington, said. “I consider it not a real, serious effort in service to lowering prescription drug prices for Americans.”
Experts said TrumpRx was likely to be most helpful for the many Americans who pay out of pocket for obesity and fertility drugs and whose health insurance doesn’t cover them.
For example, Gonal-F, an medication for in-vitro fertilization that is featured on TrumpRx for between $168 and $504, depending on the dosing, is often not covered through insurance. Less than half of insured people have insurance coverage for it through their benefit for drugs from a pharmacy, while just over a quarter have coverage through their medical benefit, according to its manufacturer, EMD Serono, a division of the German drugmaker Merck KGaA,
At the event on Thursday evening, officials introduced a woman they called Catherine and said she was the first patient to purchase Gonal-F via TrumpRx. They did not supply a spelling of her given name or her surname. She said she and her husband had been dealing with infertility and in vitro fertilization for five years. For families like hers, she said, the president’s efforts “can mean the difference between being able to continue treatment or having no choice but to stop.”
In some cases, TrumpRx could be helpful for the millions of Americans who lack health insurance of any kind for their drugs — though in these cases, companies often offer their drugs for free or at very low prices. And someone who cannot afford health insurance is unlikely to have, say, $1,518 a month for Xeljanz, an autoimmune drug for conditions like arthritis featured on TrumpRx.
People who lack insurance coverage for a medicine and can’t switch to a suitable covered alternative may find a better price on TrumpRx than if they were to walk into a pharmacy, though experts recommended first checking a price comparison website like GoodRx.
Mr. Trump began pushing for TrumpRx through an executive order last year. Soon after, he demanded that 17 major drugmakers set up programs to sell their products directly to consumers, along with other price concessions. So far, all but one of those companies have complied, in exchange for a three-year exemption from the president’s threatened tariffs on imported medicines. The last holdout, Regeneron, says it is still in talks with Trump officials.
In some ways, TrumpRx resembles other government tools to help Americans navigate the often bewilderingly complex health care system, like the Covid vaccine finder websites that health departments set up during the pandemic.
At the same time, the TrumpRx program has cast the president in a strikingly unusual role, as something akin to a pharmacist.
“The federal government has never been involved in the direct sale of prescription drugs in this way,” three Democrats in Congress wrote in one of a series of letters from lawmakers raising sharp questions about the site. Democrats have called for more oversight, and have complained that there is no way to know how the TrumpRx prices are determined or whether consumers will benefit.
Democratic lawmakers have also questioned whether the president’s family could be profiting from the site through BlinkRx, a small health technology company whose board of directors includes Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son. Last summer, a week after Mr. Trump demanded that drugmakers sell their medicines directly to patients, BlinkRx announced a new offering in which drugmakers could pay it to help them quickly set up direct-buy programs.
A spokesman for BlinkRx, Drew Hudson, declined to comment on whether his company was involved in setting up direct-buy programs for any of the 17 drugmakers Mr. Trump ordered to do so. In interviews, many of the drugmakers said they did not hire BlinkRx, but built their sites themselves or worked with different vendors.
Mr. Hudson and Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, said BlinkRx had no involvement in the creation of the TrumpRx site.
Mr. Desai also said the government would not receive a cut of the revenue when TrumpRx refers a consumer to a manufacturer’s site to buy the drugs. Manufacturers are not paying the government to be featured on TrumpRx, he said.
“The benefits are purely for the American people,” Mr. Desai said.
The TrumpRx idea reflects booming demand among Americans who have soured on insurance and are looking for ways to buy their drugs as they would any other consumer products.
Online providers like Hims & Hers have built huge businesses offering inexpensive generic drugs — for common conditions like erectile dysfunction and hair loss — and cheaper copycat versions of popular weight-loss drugs produced through a process known as compounding. The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, an online pharmacy started by the billionaire entrepreneur, has found a niche selling certain generic drugs for which patients are being overcharged through their insurance.
Over the past two decades, health plans have increasingly required consumers to pay the full cost of drugs up to a high annual limit — and then typically face co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs. Maximum out-of-pocket costs for drug and medical expenses can reach more than $6,000.
Some of the new manufacturer sites operate as stand-alone online pharmacies, while others point patients to other services. For example, Roche’s Genentech business offers Xofluza, a one-time pill to treat the flu, for $50 through two online pharmacies, Alto Pharmacy and Mr. Cuban’s site. That drug was not listed on TrumpRx on Thursday night.
Patients don’t need TrumpRx to access the manufacturer’s direct-buy sites.
Experts said the website could be a stopgap to help people stay on needed medications while they battled their insurance over delays or denials. For instance, a patient could opt to buy an asthma inhaler through TrumpRx for a month or two and then switch back to regular coverage once the insurance problems are resolved.
Drugmakers have been eager to set up direct-buy sites, which provide them yet another channel to sell their products. They have promised to sell a number of drugs via TrumpRx that were not featured on the site on Thursday evening. The White House said it planned to add more medicines in the coming months.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, said last week that TrumpRx would offer Americans “the lowest prices in the developed world.”
But the prices that employers and government programs pay for medications are generally secret, so it is not possible to tell how their prices compare with those being offered directly to patients on TrumpRx. Pfizer reported in regulatory filings this week that TrumpRx was expected to cut into profits, though the company did not say by how much.
One of the most in-demand products on TrumpRx is expected to be the pill version of Wegovy, which has been wildly popular since it became available last month. People can buy the drug from its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, for $149 for the first month and for $199 a month after that.
But just hours before Mr. Trump debuted his site, Hims & Hers undercut the president’s price for Novo’s pill, offering a compounded version for $49 for the first month and for $99 each subsequent month. Novo Nordisk, which has patents protecting its drug, called its competitor’s new offering “illegal” and accused Hims of “duping the American public.”
On Thursday evening, Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, alluded to the business tensions, writing on X that the agency “will take swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.”
Sharon LaFraniere and Erica L. Green contributed reporting.
Rebecca Robbins is a Times reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. She has been reporting on health and medicine since 2015.
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