Comment by bonsai_spool
19 days ago
> I highly recommend checking out the terms of trumprx.gov
The website is very good marketing for people who don't typically follow drug pricing. Here is more about why the only folks who will benefit are those without insurance—but those people will find better prices in several places, sometimes significantly better prices [1]. Further, it's likely that they're already finding those prices, since the website prices are no better than what you can get today outside fertility medication; and fertility medications are neither new, nor the most expensive part of that process.
This site has nothing to do with the effective subsidies that Americans provide to the world, and it will change nothing about that. The major thing that would help all Americans, negotiating for drug prices, has been neutered by the current administration. In fact, an executive order has specifically lengthened the amount of time that new drugs will be able to charge higher prices to Americans [2].
We should all be very careful in parsing news items that are not in our field of expertise.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/health/trumprx-online-dru...
2. https://www.kff.org/medicare/the-effect-of-delaying-the-sele...
Can you explain from first principles how the US market gaining MFN pricing does not benefit Americans? Open to changing my mind
I think 'MFN' is almost propaganda (not a term that existed before 2016-2020 administration) so let's leave that aside.
Are you claiming that the new website is offering lower prices than patients are paying after their co-pay? That is not the case outside the example I presented; moreover, the way the website is organized, there will be no pressure for prices to remain competitive after the initial media attention dies away.
I agree that a hypothetical case where we were paying lower prices would be better for us—but this remains an unrealized hypothetical. One way for us to pay lower prices would be to allow our government to negotiate prices for Medicare/Medicaid recipients, and that is exactly the thing that has been hampered.
Not arguing on broken internal pricing dynamics that are skewed by all sorts of gov programs and payors.
It’s about external, global pricing dynamics. The site clearly isn’t going to be able to give clean payor/pbm/gov subsidized pricing tables - that is almost an impossible exercise in our system.
What the agreement does accomplish is saying Americans will not pay $1150/mo while EU pays $400/mo while Argentina pays $120/mo.
It guarantees drugs will be greater than or equal to US pricing abroad which effectively forces pharma to find deeper profits outside of the US, or lower prices for all countries to acquire demand.
That is extremely effective. Now it’s up to a really complex group of people to figure out what that means inside our weird system of pharma/pbm/rebates/insurance/medicare.
But that’s not what trumprx is aiming to solve for right?
1 reply →
Drug companies produce drugs to make money. There is a huge investment. They maximize revenue by price discrimination to recover the cost of the good drug and all the drugs that didn't work. The US is a rich country. People in other countries can't pay as much for the drug. To maximize revenue the drug company sells the drug at a lower price to those people.
More generally, price controls lead to less supply. Drug price controls will result in fewer new drugs. Minimum wage laws result in no workers doing work that is worth less than minimum wage. Anti- price gouging laws result in less bottled water and fewer generators after a hurricane. The principle is universal despite promises of delightful state run grocery stores.
Praise for price-gouging: https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/praise-for-price-gouging