White House launches direct-to-consumer drug site TrumpRx | Hacker News Reader

White House launches direct-to-consumer drug site TrumpRx

cnbc.com

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Nice to see the admin can even flub basic math.

https://imgur.com/a/XCQr5EP

$1,449 --> $252 is "93% off", apparently?

This is the guy that promised 1000% discounts on drugs.

You know they started with 83% in there and then orange man insisted they change the "8" to a "9".

I mean, it's a typo?

Give them a break

The correct default position with this admin is bad faith and/or malice.

If you were developing this site wouldn’t you just develop a formula to calculate the discount? Hate to that’s a typo unless you didn’t do any testing.

Luckily we are able to tos\ spot lazy bs here.

The name of that website is interesting. I had heard of landmarks being named after politicians, laws being nicknamed after them (e.g. obamacare) or after judicial decisions, but it seems that it's usually, at least seemingly, by others. This one is directly named after the president launching it. I can't think of a precedent, was there one?

Incidentally, it was GOP who branded the Affordable Care Act as Obamacare in an effort to make it seem bad. Obama never asked for or wanted that name, although he later accepted it.

Trump, as we know, has an insatiable need for recognition and attempts to put his name on everything he can.

> Trump, as we know, has an insatiable need for recognition and attempts to put his name on everything he can.

"Trump says he’ll free infrastructure funds for New York if Penn Station is renamed after him":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/06/trump-penn-s...

"Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say":

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-penn-station-dulles-airport-...

Reports are that this is just a rebranded GoodRx.

The prices are exactly the same!

But there are no generics available!! Ahhh, yesss. /cackle

Link: https://bsky.app/profile/tom.medsky.social/post/3me5npjbcms2...

They both use the same Bin and PCN numbers. Reportedly the group and member ID's can be anything

Why build when you can brand.

Hm, I wonder what Mark Cuban who runs costplusdrugs.com thinks of this. He hasn't commented that I can see yet https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social

It's a much different service that Costplus

Costplus manufactures and sells drugs at a small markup over manufacturing cost.

TrumpRX appears to be more of a central clearinghouse where drug makers can offer discounts to consumers. And at least so far, they seem to be the same discounts that they already offer, when you look up a drug on the site, it redirects you to the manufacturer's website.

Maybe it's useful for people without insurance that don't know how to search look for discount programs to help them buy drugs and maybe some manufacturers will offer discounts on the site that aren't available otherwise, but it's not a competitor to Cuban's site.

I haven't heard of this but he must be pretty proud of it, the page title is literally, "Homepage of Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs", his name is in the logo, and the picture is on the front page.

The branding is... weird. I always thoughts it was just a campaigning tactic for Mark's upcoming presidential bid but given how things have played out, now I'm not so sure.

It's using Mark's brand to juice marketing scale organically.

I’ve jumped on several threads where he’s discussing the product and it seems as though he enjoys the idea of putting PBMs out of the public’s misery and making it kind of personal.

then also it’s an invitation for debate or discussion, which he seems open to and approachable about… as scoldy and confrontational as that may be from what I’ve gathered …

the gist of that is “this sucks we want single payer”

and what I’ve surmised so far is, that’s great but until we’re there I’m taking on PBMs

im okay with either or both of those objectives , neither of which are advancing.

Not really on topic for “trumprx,” forgive me. I’m trying to avoid contempt before investigation.

Contempt after reading the fine print is fine.

When Democrats regain power, what are Republicans going to complain about after 8 years of giving their guy the green light to do anything.

If history is any guide: tan suits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...), eating arugula and dijon mustard (https://theweek.com/speedreads/704818/big-controversy-point-...), terrorist fist jabs (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorist_fist_jab), and putting feet on the Oval Office desk (https://wtop.com/news/2013/09/obama-and-the-foot-on-desk-con...).

They aren't operating in good faith.

Cute.

‘If’, not ‘when’.

That won’t matter. Hypocrisy is a given.

All the damage that Trump caused, as it becomes unavoidably apparent and the propagandists pin it on the next administration. Remember the cries about price inflation during Biden's term, after Trump had turned the money printing press to 11 during Covid? Dumped interest rates, PPP handouts, and even mailing helicopter checks directly to everyone. Then when monetary velocity finally picked back up, the bill came due.

Republicans have been running this sabotage-then-criticize scam for decades now. Trump has just embraced it whole hog during his second term and it's an open question whether Democrats will even be able to stem the hemorrhaging after this one, especially as they're generally not effective at building things and so much has been wholesale destroyed.

He is desperate to come up with a grift with his name on it because he's jealous of Obamacare, which was even named by Republicans, even though they also somehow think the ACA isn't the exact same thing.

> "White House launches direct-to-consumer drug site..."

> "The site is not selling drugs directly to American patients..."

Just another layer of middlemen. They should go with the proper free market option and allow Americans to buy medication from other countries.

How could the Trump family then directly benefit from it?

Ego. Brand. But there is likely some financial angle buried in the plans somewhere.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/01/trumprx-delayed-as-se...

    There’s already reason to be suspicious of conflicts of interest with TrumpRx, the senators note. There’s a “potential relationship between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx, on whose Board the President’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., has sat since February 2025,” the senators write.

So playing "skeptic in a vacuum" for a minute—i.e., pretending that I don't know anything about this administration, and not having done any research beyond reading the linked article—this seems like a pretty good thing. Insurance companies negotiate tremendous discounts for pharmaceuticals, which means that people without insurance are often majorly screwed when trying to buy medicine. Having the government act as a negotiator with the drug companies to obtain similar discounts for the uninsured seems to be a positive move.

Happy to have someone explain to me why this is a bad take.

A step closer to Medicare for all?

Can't tell if this is serious or a joke? This site he launched is literally like Groupon for drugs, for people who don't have health insurance. It's mostly nothing, but if anything it is a step toward normalizing not having health insurance.

Assuming there's nothing wrong with it technically (scam, misleading, mishandling, whatever), then yeah, nothing wrong your take. It's just the obvious meta-problems: His name being on it creates trust issues and reluctance (and inversely: blind trust on the other side). Even just regarding image and principles: Most people justifiably hate the idea of a prideful asshole putting his name front and center on a government service - they want the comport of a president to be the opposite of a cartoonish car salesman. They might tolerate it if the guy in question doesn't cultivate that image (e.g. Obamacare), but even then, they don't want the guy to officially name it that (e.g. ACA) because that would again contribute to the image of petty self-advertisement. Of course this "normal" human psychology gets short-circuited with enough hate ("I don't like that behavior. Oh wait, my enemies also don't like? Now I like it.").

Obamacare was dubbed as such by Republicans, not by Obama himself. The R's meant for it to be derogatory.

That's not actually what's happening here.

They're the same self-pay deals the companies offer to the public already.

Wejovy, for example: https://www.novocare.com/content/dam/novonordisk/novocare/re...

(Or you can go through a compounding pharmacy for even cheaper. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hims-hers-launch-of-compou...)

Trump’s Prescription Drug Website Exposed as a Big Fat Scam - https://newrepublic.com/post/206265/trump-prescription-drug-... - February 6th, 2026

https://x.com/cturnbull1968/status/2019602529278136786 | https://archive.today/IG7Au

https://x.com/okcreports/status/2019655323137589399 | https://archive.today/mbMdd

Is this like Trump University?

Another scam? Yes

Yet another scam[1], just like "no tax on overtime".

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/post/206265/trump-prescription-drug-...

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