President Donald Trump’s direct-to-consumer website for pharmaceutical discounts is expanding significantly. On May 18, the White House announced that TrumpRx now features discounts on more than 600 generic medications, through partnerships with Amazon Pharmacy, Cost Plus Drugs and GoodRx. The site still does very little to actually lower costs for most people buying most prescription medications, and is mostly just listing discounts that already exist.
TrumpRx doesn’t sell any medications directly. It offers coupons, or in some cases links to manufacturer websites where discounted prices are available. But all of this requires paying cash, and so the site is of little use to most people with either public or private health insurance.
When the site launched in February, after several months of buildup, it featured discounts for 42 name-brand medications and one authorized generic (meaning the medication itself is identical to the name-brand version, but the labeling is generic). These represented the “most-favored-nation” (MFN) pricing that Trump falsely claimed to have negotiated to historic lows. In many cases, the site was just offering discounts that were already available from manufacturers. Trump’s claim that no other country offers lower prices on the name-brand pharmaceuticals in his MFN deals has also been widely debunked.
The site now has two categories of discounts: “Presidential deals,” which now lists 72 name-brand medications, and “Standard prices,” which lists 602 generic medications and the discounts available through one or more of the three partner companies.
“Consumers will now have one source to ensure that they’re getting the lowest possible cost on their prescription,” Trump said during a May 18 press event. “With these additions TrumpRx will feature the best and lowest prices on prescriptions used by tens of millions of Americans already. And in some cases the discounted generics available through TrumpRx may be offered at an even lower cash price than the out-of-pocket insurance cost. Which has always been the lowest, but we’re going to be lower.”
The site does not feature any controlled substances or other medications with Food and Drug Administration-mandated risk evaluation and mitigation strategies.
Trump claimed that the site has already saved consumers more than $400 million.
“[MFN deals are] one-off agreements made for publicity purposes. They don’t change anything about the way drugs are priced,” Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School whose research focuses on drug prices, told KFF Health News earlier in May. “The agreements are opaque and unenforceable.”
Trump claimed at the press event that the site has already saved consumers more than $400 million. He also claimed that per the Council of Economic Advisers, the MFN pricing will save consumers more than $500 billion over the next decade.
“It’s truly the hottest thing in medicine,” he continued. “This has been the greatest breakthrough in lowering health care costs in modern history.”
Cost Plus Drugs was cofounded by billionaire Marc Cuban, who stated at the May 18 press event that his company is behind 559 of the new generic additions.
Cuban, who in the 2024 presidential election endorsed Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, was criticized on social media for his involvement in the TrumpRx expansion. In a now-deleted tweet, he called anyone who “thinks I’m going to put politics ahead of helping Americans reduce their” health care costs “a fucking idiot.”
Image via the White House
