TrumpRx isn’t doing much for drug prices. What would it take to change that?

Americans are furious about the price of drugs. The Trump administration’s response? A new website.

But more than a month after its launch, the TrumpRx.gov site remains small — offering discounts on just 54 prescription drugs. Many of these drugs already have cheaper generic versions or savings programs available elsewhere, and the discounts cannot be used with insurance or counted toward a deductible. The notoriety of the site remains limited.

The question of whether TrumpRx actually reduces drug prices is important beyond the success of the website itself. For President Donald Trump, this is linked to a broader rise in health care costs as the midterms approach. But for many Americans, the problem cuts to something deeper: years of frustration with a system they say works against them, where prices are hard to track and it’s not always clear whether they’re getting a fair deal.

Health policy experts say what the administration does next will determine whether TrumpRx remains just another option or whether it evolves into something that actually helps make prescription drug costs easier to manage.

“The idea is not really new, but it kind of has that Trump brand,” said Audrey Kearney, a senior survey analyst at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group. “It’s another option for consumers, and we’ll kind of have to stay tuned to see if it’s going to make a real difference.”

Kearney co-authored a survey released last week by KFF that found that about a third of people who take prescription drugs said they had heard at least something about TrumpRx. Only 7% said they visited the site to compare prices, with that figure rising to around 16% among people taking GLP-1 drugs.

Even the White House acknowledges that the website is still in its early stages. A White House official declined to say how many people have visited the site or how many drugs will be added there this month.

The official said IVF treatments and GLP-1 weight loss drugs were among the most sought-after drugs so far. The administration plans to add “a larger batch” of drugs to the platform soon, the official said, and hopes to work with Congress to codify some drug pricing agreements into law as part of a broader health care plan.

“We don’t view this as a final product,” the official said. “The objective here is to have the president’s Major Health Plan adopted to codify these [Most Favored Nation] so if people use insurance to purchase these medications, they can also access the savings.

There is no indication that Congress will pass the legislation.

What could TrumpRx do differently?

In practice, TrumpRx works like existing discount sites such as GoodRx or Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co., allowing people to compare cash prices of drugs, but with fewer tools and less flexibility — and no way to purchase directly through the site.

“What’s fascinating about TrumpRx is that it’s presented as a new and innovative thing, when in fact it’s kind of an amalgamation of things that already existed,” said Antonio Ciaccia, CEO of 46brooklyn, a nonprofit group that tracks prescription drug prices.

The site relies on GoodRx’s pricing data and technology to power many of its listings, Ciaccia said: Coupon cards are processed through GoodRx’s network, using the same BIN and PCN numbers — the codes pharmacies use to process drug discounts at the pharmacy counter.

What TrumpRx needs most is scale, said Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the University of Southern California.

Of the initial batch of drugs on the site, about half have generic versions that are often much cheaper, Joyce said. These generics are also widely available on other discount sites or at local pharmacies.

“In its current form, it is of limited utility to uninsured consumers,” Joyce said. “If they got rid of everyone that had generic equivalents, you would end up with a site with 22 drugs. And it’s basically a selection of the usual suspects. It’s IVF, it’s GLP-1. It’s not a broad scope.”

“Fifty-four drugs out of thousands, proportionally speaking, that’s a very small segment of the population,” Ciaccia said.

Still, Joyce and Ciaccia said TrumpRx has the potential — with the right investments — to go beyond existing discount sites.

Ciaccia said the platform could play a larger role for people with private or workplace insurance, where patients don’t always have access to the cheapest drug.

Pharmacy benefit managers, who decide which drugs should be included on insurers’ formularies, often favor more expensive brand-name drugs to get bigger discounts, sometimes excluding cheaper generics — a practice that can drive up costs for patients.

In these cases, patients might turn to a platform like TrumpRx to find a cheaper brand-name drug, even if their insurance favors that same drug at a higher cost.

“I think TrumpRx could not be a cure for the problems that exist today, but it could perhaps supplant the system that we have,” Ciaccia said. “If the reductions begin to improve, there could be an option for employers who are already least impacted in terms of their benefits through PBMs.

Joyce also said the platform could become more useful by providing more transparency on drug prices, a goal of the Trump administration’s health care agenda.

He cited Cost Plus Drug Co. as a starting point, where users can see a breakdown of a drug’s price, including ingredient cost, markup and shipping.

Currently, TrumpRx shows what people would pay compared to the drugmaker’s list price. This comparison can be misleading, however, because insurance rarely pays this price and even people without insurance usually receive discounts.

Improving transparency could include showing how prices vary by pharmacy or region, how discounts are negotiated, and how insurance compares to cash prices.

“It’s the uninsured people who have been screwed the most,” Joyce said. “There are lower prices and, from an educational and informational standpoint, I think that’s valuable.”