US President Donald Trump has repeated several times in recent weeks that, under his Administration, the United States now has the “lowest drug prices in the world.”
“We had the highest prices on the planet, by far, and now we have the lowest prices in the world,” she said during a Mother’s Day event on May 8, talking about medications. “I think it’s one of the greatest things we’ve ever done.”
However, a review by Noticias Telemundo shows that what Trump said it isn’t true.
🟥 Higher costs compared to other markets
The president has said that the lower costs are the result of measures such as the launch of his TrumpRx platform, which offers discount vouchers so that people who do not have health insurance can pay less when buying certain medications at pharmacies. This is for so-called purchases out-of-pocketeither on your own or paid out of your own pocket.
(Obamacare health insurance enrollment plummets after Republican cuts to subsidies)
The platform currently contains about 80 medications for which vouchers can be processed.
Several are very specialized drugs that are still on patent (i.e., there are no generic versions—at least not on the US market—which usually cost considerably less). That includes Enbrel, which relieves rheumatic symptoms in people with certain autoimmune diseases, and would cost $3,353.94 with TrumpRx discounts for those who need to buy it without health insurance in the US each month. Pero is more expensive compared to the average cost of $2,300 US at Canadian pharmacies.
Although it is worth noting that TrumpRx also promises savings on brand-name drugs that do have generic versions available in the US, for which Americans They could pay less without having to use the platform of the president. Among them is Pristiq, to treat clinical depression, which is listed at an estimated cost of $200 already with discounts on the TrumpRx website, while in pharmacies the generic version costs around $38.
TrumpRx also has some very popular medications among the general population in recent years, such as Ozempic, which is more expensive in the United States than in other countries.
The platform promises that the maximum price that will have to be paid out of pocket for this registered brand of semaglutide – which helps deal with insulin resistance or diabetes and also has other beneficial uses for the human metabolism – will be $199 for the formulation in 4 milligram pills or for the injectable pen version that dispenses 0.25 milligrams or 0.5 milligrams for each use, as required by the medical prescription.
Noticias Telemundo’s review of the prices of the equivalent versions in other countries, including the closest geographically, Mexico and Canada, shows that with this the United States It definitely doesn’t have the “world’s lowest.”
That is to say, This assertion by Trump is false.
🟥 Most favored nations?
Trump has also said that one way his administration has supposedly lowered drug costs “like never before” is through negotiations with pharmaceutical companies.
It has had two types of negotiations: one that has been held annually for a long time and is to establish more affordable prices for drugs that are obtained through the Medicare or Medicaid system, public health insurance to which Trump made cuts last year.
The other negotiation that Trump has entered into with pharmaceutical companies is with a mechanism called “most favored nations,” with which some pharmaceutical companies said they will reduce the prices of certain drugs that are imported into the United States after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on them. The reduction would be so that the prices set by those companies for American buyers are not higher than those in other countries with comparable economies.
However, several public affairs and governance monitoring groups have highlighted that many of these most favored nation agreements They haven’t even been finalized, in part because they require Congress to codify the most favored nations plan, given that Capitol Hill is the one that has the constitutional power to approve or not approve tariffs for pharmaceutical companies that do not apply the pact.
“This supposed regulatory framework is far from a reality,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of access to medicines at the analysis organization Public Citizen, in a recent statement.
This month, the Trump Administration published a report in which it ensures that the changes in most favored nations could “generate $529 billion in savings” over the next decade.
The report does not clarify where the calculations used to obtain this estimate came from, and there is no evidence to be able to reach the same amount in reviews done independently.
🟥 More inaccuracies about drug discounts
Trump’s false claim that the United States would have the lowest prices for these drugs It is not the only misinformation about it that his Government has recently disclosed.
In April, for example, both Trump and his Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that their measures have achieved discounts of more than 100% in the cost of sale of several medications, which is not possible (there cannot be discounts that are greater than the total price of a product: the buyer would have to pay “less” than nothing).
(How Trump is accentuating the gap between rich and poor: “I feel afraid every time I go to the supermarket”)
Kennedy later attempted to defend these statements during a congressional hearing in which he said, “President Trump has another way of calculating percentages.”
There is only one way to calculate percentages, but Kennedy still tried to paint as a possible example that “if there is a drug that cost $600, and now costs $10, that is a 600% reduction.” This is completely mistaken: such a reduction would be 98% according to the mathematical standards for making these calculations.
