President Donald Trump has announced several initiatives aimed at reducing prescription drug costs, a concern for about 60% of American adults who worry about affording medication. According to a recent KFF nationwide poll, more than 80% of Americans consider prescription drug prices “unreasonable” and support increased regulation to lower costs.
Americans pay roughly three times as much as people in other countries for the same prescription drugs. In an effort to address this, Trump sent letters to 17 drugmakers last July, demanding they voluntarily lower drug prices.
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Trump also met with pharmaceutical executives at the White House, announcing that he had compelled them to agree to “most favored nation” pricing on Medicaid. However, the scope of these agreements remains uncertain, with many details, including which drugs are covered, unclear.
The White House unveiled TrumpRx, a site where cash-paying patients can find discounted medicines. The site offers discounts on certain branded drugs, including fertility and weight loss medications. Mark Cuban, a billionaire investor, noted that discounted pricing on TrumpRx for branded fertility drugs and GLP-1 weight loss drugs could benefit people without insurance or whose plans don’t include coverage.
Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the Trump announcements are “one-off agreements made for publicity purposes” and don’t change the way drugs are priced. He added that the agreements are opaque and unenforceable.
A consulting firm, 46brooklyn, found that close to 1,000 brand drugs went up in price in January 2026, and 2025 had the highest number of list price increases ever. Antonio Ciaccia, the company’s co-founder, said, “This is not a material change, it’s business as usual.”
In the first week of 2026, Pfizer raised the list prices of 71 drugs by an average of 5% and lowered the price of only one, by 9.8%. The biggest win for patients has likely been the Trump administration’s quiet continuation of a Biden administration program: Medicare drug price negotiation for expensive drugs.
The negotiated discounts on the initial 10 drugs went into effect Jan. 1, with reductions in price of well over 50% on some products, resulting in estimated $6 billion in annual savings. An additional 15 high-priced drugs, including popular weight loss and cancer drugs, were subject to negotiation in 2025, with discounted Medicare prices taking effect next year.
Even as these discounts take effect, drug industry lobbyists have been working to limit the impact, with some success. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act exempts drugs for rare diseases from negotiations.
Kesselheim said the Medicare price negotiations are historic because it’s the first time the United States has negotiated prices like every other developed country. “And guess what? Innovation didn’t stop.”
The Trump administration’s newer initiatives, such as TrumpRx, help some patients, but they are limited and require knowledge of how to access the discounts. Sean Tu, a patent law expert at the University of Alabama, noted that the branded companies aren’t making a sacrifice by offering drugs at lower costs on TrumpRx, as they would not have made the sale otherwise.
Most of the TrumpRx products are available only to customers without insurance who pay cash. The discounts offered on the site, such as a drop in the price of the arthritis drug Xeljanz from $2,277 to $1,518 a month, would still leave the drug unaffordable for many.
The TrumpRx site consists largely of Pfizer’s 30 drugs, with a smattering of discounts likely to generate headlines. These include three fertility drugs from EMD Serono, a subsidiary of Merck KGaA, which could save women thousands of dollars, although the overall cost of fertility treatment will continue to be out of reach for many.
In exchange for lowering prices, EMD Serono got tariffs lifted on its mostly overseas-produced medications and won the right to a sped-up U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process for a fertility drug.
Another newsworthy offering on the site resulted from a deal with Novo Nordisk for Wegovy, its GLP-1 drug for weight loss and diabetes, with the price reduced to as little as $199 a month for the pen.
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