A comparison of TrumpRx.gov prices against UK National Health Service pharmacy payouts found that drugs from several major manufacturers remain significantly cheaper under the British system.
A Reuters analysis of the Trump administration's TrumpRx.gov prescription drug website has found that prices listed on the platform are not uniformly lower than those paid in the United Kingdom.
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The analysis undermines the White House's claim that the initiative delivers the world's lowest drug prices for Americans.
In a previous
In its article, Reuters compared prices listed on the site against publicly available UK National Health Service pharmacy payouts for drugs from eight participating companies.
The analysis found that prices for roughly one third of the 54 drugs available on the site were lower in the UK. Among them were Pfizer's arthritis pill Xeljanz, AstraZeneca's diabetes drug Farxiga, and GSK's lung disease inhalers, each between 67% and 82% cheaper under the UK system.1
President Trump has claimed some medicines are now "300% to 600%" cheaper through the program, a figure Reuters noted is mathematically impossible.
The largest discounts on TrumpRx are concentrated in obesity medications and fertility drug categories that are often not covered by insurance and where patients are more likely to pay out of pocket.2
Eli Lilly's Zepbound and Novo Nordisk's Wegovy are both available for between $149 and $350 per month on average, down from list prices exceeding $1,000 per month following
Critics and industry observers note that TrumpRx reflects direct-to-consumer cash prices rather than what most Americans actually pay through private or government-sponsored insurance.
In a
Wayne Winegarden, a medical economist at the Pacific Research Institute, described the site as a coupon book that sets a rough ceiling on out-of-pocket cash spending without addressing the underlying policy drivers of high drug prices.1
Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, noted the deals are voluntary with no enforcement mechanism. "I'm not surprised that the end result is something that is not workable for the vast, vast majority of patients," he said.
According to Reuters, in England, patients pay a standard prescription charge of $13 per medicine regardless of the drug's cost, with prescriptions free in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, a fundamentally different cost structure that makes direct comparisons with U.S. cash prices difficult.1
Novartis and Roche say the impact will be immaterial to earnings, while Johnson & Johnson estimates a hit of hundreds of millions of dollars, a figure BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Seigerman called a rounding error relative to J&J's more than $60 billion in annual pharmaceutical sales.1
Novo Nordisk offered the starkest warning, saying sales and profit could fall by as much as 13% in 2026, partly due to the negotiated pricing on obesity drugs.1
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