By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
Approximately 68% of Americans regularly take prescription medication, states CivicScience and about 26% take four or more daily. According to Statisa, prescription spending in the US will reach about $557 billion this year, amounting to $1,491 per person annually. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention states that 8% of adult Americans avoid taking prescribed medication because of the cost.
In February, President Donald Trump launched TrumpRx (https://trumprx.gov) to “deliver ‘the world’s lowest prices on prescription drugs’ to Americans, finally ending an era where the U.S. ‘subsidiz[es] the entire world.’” The website states.
The site allows users to look up their prescription medications so they can compare prices. TrumpRx isn’t government run prescription provision or insurance, but a resource to compare the cost of buying directly from manufacturers compared with purchasing with insurance, all thanks to policy deals between the 16 participating drug manufacturers and the Trump administration.
The site lists 43 medications that are part of the discount program. The savings are up to 93% off.
Now retired, George Chapman operated G.W. Chapman Consulting as a hospital consultant. He said that TrumpRx is not likely to help many people.
“Odds are, what you’re looking for is not available,” Chapman said. “Cash spent will not be applied to your deductible or out-of-pocket maximum. So, it’s as if the transaction never happened as far as your insurance is concerned.”
That could matter for people whose prescription drug spending is significant enough that meeting their deductible enables them to take full advantage of their coverage.
TrumpRx could help those who have no health insurance. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 17.9% of Americans younger than 65 lack health insurance (typically, those 65 and older have Medicare).
Chapman would like to see widespread price negotiation.
“The drug companies don’t want to negotiate,” Chapman said. “They were forced by the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Biden. It allows Medicare to finally negotiate 15 prices a year.”
He added that in 2003, Congress passed the Medicare Modernization Act that prevents Medicare from negotiating with drug companies, which he sees as a tradeoff for the introduction of prescription drug coverage via Medicare Part D.
“Drug companies said that it prohibits the secretary from Health and Human Service from directly negotiating with drug companies. Why don’t they repeal the law? Instead, the drug companies allowed us to negotiate only 15 drugs when Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That shows the control the drug lobby has on the US.”
The higher prices Americans pay for prescription drugs subsidizes most of drug manufacturers’ research and development — Chapman estimates that’s about 20% of their overhead while most of what they make goes towards marketing — while people in other countries pay far less for medication, even though the US, as 5% of the world population buys 50% of the worldwide prescription drug supply.
“What Trump wants is favored nation status,” Chapman said.
Although pharmacy benefit managers appear to negotiate lower prices for customers, Chapman calls those efforts “a joke” as the savings are paltry and seldom sought. Different pharmacies can charge wildly different prices for the same medications depending upon the type of insurance a customer presents.
“No one knows what anything costs in the drug world; prices are all over the place,” Chapman said. “Congress has no problem saying this is the fee schedule for hospitals. But with drug manufacturers, there’s nothing they can do about it.”
