It’s part of the twisted logic that is Trump that his entire family is cockeyed except for one niece/cousin, depending on what generation of Trump you are. Cousin Mary is referred to by Cousin Eric as “disturbed.” That makes perfect sense, because as cockamamie as Eric’s worldview is, somebody with common sense and a bullshit detector doubtlessly plays out as disturbed. Here is Mary holding forth on TrumpRx, which Uncle Donald calls “a miracle.”
TrumpRx is not healthcare.
It is not insurance. It is not universal coverage. It does not guarantee treatment, preventative care, emergency services, or even access to a doctor. It is a coupon and referral website wrapped in the branding and self congratulation of a regime that has spent years dismantling the already inadequate healthcare system millions of Americans depend on.
And naturally, Donald is pretending that it is a miracle.
Donald: I think it’s maybe other than medical itself, like a cure, I think it’s the biggest thing to happen in healthcare ever maybe. We paid the highest price in the world. Now we’re paying as of now, we’re paying the lowest price in the world.
None of that is true.
Donald recently announced that TrumpRx would expand by adding more than 600 generic medications through partnerships with Amazon Pharmacy, GoodRx, and Cost Plus Drugs. The Trump regime claims this will dramatically lower prescription costs for Americans.
But according to reporting from the Associated Press, most insured Americans are still better off using their insurance while uninsured people and people with high deductibles are left comparison shopping for life saving medications inside an already fragmented system that Republicans continue making worse.
TrumpRx does not provide healthcare coverage. Patients still have to pay out of pocket for doctor appointments in order to get prescriptions. The discounts do not count toward insurance deductibles, making long term care even harder to afford.
In other words, it sounds like a scam because it is one.
The timing of this so called expansion also matters. Republicans simultaneously cut Medicaid and allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, driving premiums and healthcare costs even higher for millions of Americans. As a result, millions of people can no longer afford healthcare at all.
Critics argue that TrumpRx does nothing to solve the healthcare crisis. It simply forces Americans to navigate a collapsing system on their own while Donald pretends handing people coupons somehow counts as governance.
And then there is the math.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing in April, Senator Elizabeth Warren questioned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. about Donald’s claim that TrumpRx lowered drug prices by as much as 600 percent.
Senator Warren: The president pitched his Trump RX website as the answer for Americans who are worried about healthcare costs. He claims that Trump RX has reduced prices by as much as 600%. Six hundred percent, which I think means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.
Warren then pointed to a specific example. A thirty day supply of Protonix cost approximately $200 on TrumpRx while the identical generic version, pantoprazole, cost only $16 at Costco.
When Warren asked Kennedy whether he knew the price difference, he admitted he did not.
Instead, Kennedy attempted to defend Donald’s mathematically impossible claim.
RFK Jr. : President Trump has a different way of calculating. There’s two ways of calculating percentage. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to 10, that’s a 600% reduction.
There are not “two ways” of calculating percentages.
The truly alarming part is not simply that Kennedy said something so obviously false. It is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services felt compelled to invent an entirely new version of mathematics rather than admit Donald was wrong.
That is where we are now.
Senator Warren later concluded that people using TrumpRx actually have better than a one in four chance of paying more for medication, not less, because the site often steers consumers toward expensive brand name drugs rather than cheaper generics.
It’s the Trump University paradigm converted to prescription drugs and we know all too well how that ended. The only difference there is that people weren’t finding themselves automatically enrolled in Trump University and conceivably that could happen if TrumpRx really gets off the ground.
