If you’ve ever stood at a pharmacy counter and felt blindsided by the price, you already know the truth: the current state of our health system is not centered around patients. Why? Countries and companies are freeloading off your dollars.
Everywhere else in life you see what something costs before you pay. At a restaurant, you get a menu. You see the options, you see the price, and you decide. In health care, you don’t get a menu. Instead, you get a surprise. And that surprise has led to decades of rising health costs and surprise bills – with a third of the working age population reporting medical debt.
With $5.5 trillion of GDP dedicated towards health spending, the idea that patients are still not getting what they need is inconceivable. To take action against this freeloading, President Trump took the first step towards his Great Healthcare Plan by launching TrumpRx. The goal? Giving patients more control over their health costs, making it harder for countries and companies to freeload off their dollars. Now, Americans have a direct path to their medications, straight from the manufacturers. No arguments with a health insurer, no surprises at the pharmacy counter, no taxpayer-funded medicines going to Europe at pennies on the dollar. Just an easy-to-navigate way to get their prescription drugs at no-middleman prices. It’s completely unprecedented.
Take, for example, a patient taking a drug to treat rheumatoid arthritis. These drugs are finicky, meaning that even trying a generic (or biosimilar) alternative doesn’t always work for the patient. On paper, the right drug might be covered but with strings attached. This means the patient could go through hours of prior authorizations or “fail first” strategies because the patient’s healthcare plan and pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) gave preference to an alternative drug that technically could work but doesn’t work for the patient themselves. TrumpRx changes that by including drugs to treat this and similar conditions, making sure that patients have every possible option to get the drug their doctor prescribed at an affordable cost. At America First Policy Institute, we found that a patient on one of these drugs, with the projected “Most Favored Nation” pricing on TrumpRx, could save up to 95 percent in their annual health costs.
That is what happens when the president does kitchen table math, advocating for the mom or dad balancing a mortgage and other monthly bills by pushing back on the freeloaders in the health system. Take the single mom on Obamacare. Even if her drug was covered by her insurance, kitchen table math would show that she should use TrumpRx instead of her insurance because she could save potentially 38.5 percent compared to her own plan. Mom is no longer beholden to a health system that doesn’t work for her.
This is patients-first policymaking by President Trump that looks for ways to make health care easier to use with greater control by patients and at lower costs. At lightning speed, President Trump has taken on the freeloading that has slowly increased prices and decreased transparency for patients.
For decades, other countries invested little in developing cures because they could just pay pennies on the dollar for the treatments developed in the American market. America-last policymakers were so desperate to seek the approval of other countries that they let American patients get ripped off. Instead of insisting that other countries pay their fair share for drugs that American companies and American research institutions developed, they green lit trade deals that allowed other countries to charge much less, or, allowed countries to access generic versions of American taxpayer-funded drugs before Americans could access the generic version of those drugs.
TrumpRx uses Most Favored Nation pricing to end this global freeloading, and it is already working. Reports show that costs between Switzerland and the United States are starting to even out. In addition, the Trump administration has secured a commitment from the U.K. to end their share in global freeloading. From defense to health care, American taxpayers aren’t going to let other wealthy countries freeload off of our investments.
It’s not just wealthy countries that freeload off American patients – it’s Fortune 50 companies that use anti-competitive practices to siphon patient dollars away from patient care. President Trump ended this freeloading by signing into law a long-awaited PBM transparency bill, which forces PBMs to provide an itemized receipt for their drug costs, meaning no more hidden costs. The administration, through the Federal Trade Commission, announced a settlement with one of the largest PBMs, Express Scripts, to reverse decades of anti-competitive behavior which led to patients being forced into higher-cost drugs. And now through TrumpRx, the president is making drugs available to all Americans at a no-middleman cost – making these PBMs compete with TrumpRx to provide drugs at the lowest cost.
President Trump is putting patients first by giving Americans more control over their health and their healthcare dollars by ending the freeloading off of the American patient.
Hannah Anderson is the Director of Healthy America Policy and Senior Director of Policy at the America First Policy Institute.
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