The administration’s direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical sales platform will offer products from Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, Amgen and more at a discount, though the impact of such pricing remains to be seen.
After a short delay, the government direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical platform TrumpRx will launch at 7 pm EST on Thursday.
The platform will require patients to pay in cash, offering discounted access to drugs from several Big Pharma companies, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk and Amgen.
President Donald Trump will be joined by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) chief Mehmet Oz at an announcement Thursday evening regarding the launch, according to Axios, which first broke the news. Joe Gebbia, cofounder of AirBnb and a member of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will also be present.
“This historic announcement will impact millions of Americans. You won’t want to miss it! Tune in,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Axios.
Last week, the Trump administration announced that the launch of TrumpRx would be delayed by an unspecified amount of time, potentially due to anti-kickback concerns. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the launch would happen “probably in the next 10 days,” Politico reported at the time.
The initial offerings on TrumpRx will include Amgen’s lipid-lowering drug Repatha, Pfizer’s asthma drug Airsupra and Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s respective GLP-1 products.
Trump’s stated intention is lowering drug prices for patients, but some have cast doubt on the effectiveness of direct-to-consumer models for pharmaceutical sales.
“Only the uninsured or those with high-deductible plans might experience net savings through DTC purchases, while the majority of insured patients would pay less through traditional insurance channels,” Jason Shafrin, senior managing director of the Center for Healthcare Economics & Policy at FTI Consulting, told BioSpace in November.
On the other hand, DTC pricing might help “a select group of cash-paying patients” seeking certain drugs, particularly GLP-1s, Tyler Young, an independent pharmacist and owner of Vashon Pharmacy, told BioSpace in an email that same month.
