Trump RX: It Doesn’t Help Patients, But It Gets Trump’s Name on Something
Image Source: trumprx.gov
This country has had some bad presidents, but it’s a bit hard to imagine a president whose main goal is to put his name on things and who would openly steal billions from the Treasury. But that is Donald Trump.
Starting with the quest to get his name on stuff. We now have the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which used to be the United States Institute of Peace, before Elon Musk shut it down. We have the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Memorial Center, which Trump also shut down. There are also the Trump accounts which will allow homeless and hungry kids to have accounts that pay fees to a brokerage house.
And now we have Trump Rx, which is supposed to be Donald Trump’s big effort to make drugs cheaper — 1,500 percent cheaper, according to people named Donald Trump. This could just be a funny joke if paying for drugs was not such a major problem for many people with serious medical conditions.
Despite Trump’s boasts of being a master negotiator aside, people will not find much in the way of deals at Trump Rx. It doesn’t actually provide new discounts on drugs. The site just gives people coupons that allow them to get the discounted prices that the companies already offered on their websites.
Even worse, more than half (26 of 43) of the drugs on Trump Rx are already available as low-cost generics at prices far lower than the prices the site offers. To take the example posted on MSN’s site, Trump Rx offers a 30-day supply of the antidepressant drug Pristiq for $200, which is less than half of the list price. However, a generic version of the drug is available at GoodRx for $30 and at Mark Cuban’s CostPlusDrugs for $16.65.
This means that someone buying Pristiq from Trump Rx would be paying 1,100 percent more than they would at Mark Cuban’s site. That doesn’t sound like the road to affordability.
For anyone interested in what we are actually paying for drugs, the answer is 7.5 percent more in 2025 than in 2024. In Trump’s loony tune head prices might be falling by more than 1000 percent, but when it comes to people’s pocketbooks, they are paying more for drugs.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
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