There was a time when Democrats acted like they wanted to make health care more affordable. Delivering on that promise has never actually been their strong suit. For example, Obamacare has just made health insurance more expensive. For Democrats, making healthcare more affordable has been just a bad case of performance art. Remember when Joe Biden took office, and one of his first acts was to axe a Trump executive order designed to lower insulin costs. He later tried to take credit for lowering insulin prices himself through the Inflation Reduction Act.
The truth is, Democrats love talking about affordability, but they rarely follow through. If they genuinely cared about bringing down drug costs, they’d be applauding President Trump’s latest effort to slash prescription drug prices. Instead, they're attacking him.
Yesterday, Trump announced TrumpRx, a new government website where Americans can shop for cheaper prescription drugs. The platform promises to deliver massive savings on medications, including wildly expensive weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Monthly prices for Ozempic drop from $1,028 to as low as $199, while Wegovy falls from $1,349 to $149 for the pill version. Zepbound, another popular weight loss medication, will drop from $1,088 to around $299. Other drugs are also available for these discounts. You search the site, find the prescriptions that apply to you, and you get a coupon for those prescriptions.
In every sense, it achieves something that Democrats have talked and talked and talked about, but never succeeded in doing. Naturally, Democrats can't bring themselves to celebrate Americans getting relief. Instead, they're spinning a new attack angle by claiming Trump is making drugs more expensive in other countries.
Yeah, other countries.
The criticism stems from Trump's policy forcing pharmaceutical companies to reduce US prices to match the lowest levels paid in other developed nations. Rather than lowering prices here, some drug manufacturers are responding by hiking costs abroad.
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“In Switzerland, new medications typically cost far less than in the US, so in theory Americans should benefit from the change,” the outlet reported. “The problem is, instead of bringing prices down in the US, pharmaceutical companies are raising them elsewhere.”
Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.
This whole situation exposes something Democrats would rather not discuss. For decades, American patients have been subsidizing drug costs for Europeans and their so-called "free" healthcare systems. Europeans typically pay far less for new medications than Americans do, which means that U.S. patients should theoretically benefit from Trump's pricing changes. So why is the left more outraged over the fact that Trump’s program is causing prices to go up in other countries than the fact that the Americans have been subsidizing socialized medicine abroad? Why are we all “in this together?” Why is the world treating America like an ATM?
The TrumpRx program represents exactly the kind of bold action Democrats claim to support but never actually deliver. Trump is putting Americans first and making real affordability happen. Democrats are stuck complaining that the rest of the world might have to shoulder more of the burden. Most people would say that’s more than fair.
