Mr. Trump doesn’t think like most of us. He sees everything as having potential. A resource to be tapped or leveraged, even when that might have been the enemy in the past. With the right deal, we can take that thing, whatever it is, and put it to good use. This is why he talks to our enemies, his enemies, and everyone else.
If there’s juice, how can we best squeeze it to make America Great Again? If the juice is just poison, what then?
Pfizer is a global leader in poison, and you’d be right never to want to forgive them for what they did during COVID. Most of our readers would rather see them blue-faced, swinging from a rope with crows picking at their eyes than breathing freely—jail, fines, economic and personal misery, and a collapse of their sordid enterprise. However, Pfizer, for all its faults, which are numerous, develops hundreds of drugs that improve people’s quality of life every day. What if fear of much-deserved retribution (in several forms) could be leveraged to improve a lot of lives, every day, for years to come?
What if you could use that strategy, once Pfizer was corralled, to get the other pharma companies on board too? What if it saved regular Americans billions of dollars annually by realigning how prescription medication is delivered? Direct access. Lower prices. Bypassing insurance companies, benefit managers, and pharmacies, which all add to the cost of that form of care.
So, we are clear, Pfizer should not be off the hook for mass murder and genocide, but our elected officials gave them that immunity, and our elected officials are the ones who need to take it away, and that doesn’t happen until we elect people who will do that.
Trump Rx
I got an email yesterday with a link to some content about Trump selling us out to Pfizer. It had that air to it. You know the one. The “someone is trying too hard to sow division among MAGA Republicans. ” There’s a lot of that. Most of it comes from the left or Neo-con agitators who pad the pockets of “influencers,” on the supposed right. That makes it interesting, and Trump had clearly done something to shake up the establishment, so what was it?
TrumpRx is a federal government initiative centered around a new website, TrumpRx.gov, slated to launch in early 2026. The primary stated goal is to lower the cost of prescription drugs for Americans by creating a new pathway for purchasing medications directly from manufacturers at discounted rates.
The government-operated website will not directly sell or distribute medications. Instead, it’s designed to function as a search portal. Consumers can use the site to look up their prescriptions and, if a drug is part of the program, they will be redirected to the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s own direct-to-consumer platform to complete the purchase. This portal model keeps the government out of the complex logistics of the pharmaceutical supply chain.
The initiative was launched through a landmark voluntary agreement with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which became the first drugmaker to formally commit to the program’s principles. The administration has stated its expectation that other pharmaceutical companies will negotiate similar deals in the future.
One note of caution. The Handmaiden Media isn’t telling Democrats to hate this, but some industry experts don’t think it will help too many people. Paying for drugs through insurance will continue to cost a lot less, so why bother?
Great question. It’s cheaper still to use Amazon’s new pharmacy with insurance and your prescription, so is TrumpRx even necessary? Maybe. The greater effect of the deal-making has other beneficial side effects. Most-favored-nation status in pricing requires pricing attempts to end the abuse heaped on Americans to recover perceived losses elsewhere.
The administration’s central argument for implementing MFN pricing is to end what it terms “global freeloading”. The theory posits that the United States disproportionately finances global pharmaceutical innovation.
According to this view, other developed nations use their centralized, single-payer health systems to impose artificially low price controls on drugs. This forces pharmaceutical manufacturers to recoup their research and development costs and generate profits by charging significantly higher prices in the less-regulated U.S. system.
Bringing R&D, development, and manufacturing back to the US to avoid tariffs creates jobs and wealth that trickles directly into other parts of the US economy.
Regardless of the price benefits or lack thereof at Trump Rx from 30,000 feet, this could help lower some healthcare costs, and it creates a new precedent. Making direct-to-consumer a thing not run by the government but encouraged by it.
Trump didn’t sell America’s souls to Pfizer; he put a bit in their mouth and told them, ‘You need to help us out.’ We can be your friend or your enemy, and in this case, he’s not trying to get them to do him favors; he is trying to take another segment of the health care industrial complex in a different direction.
Maybe it works, maybe not, but it isn’t anything anyone else has tried or had the balls and vision to road test. Using government, not to take it over and ruin it, but to incentivize behavior and systems that could eventually lead to lower costs and better outcomes. [Related: MACDONALD: Goodlander’s Common Sense “Budget” (To Prevent a Shutdown) Bwahahaha!]
It’s not my perfect solution. I’d like to see the government get out of the way and let the market sort it all out, and there are hints of this elsewhere, but we’ll have to wait to see what else might get done before Democrats find a way to poison it.
One point we should not let escape the public debate is that Republicans are trying new things that don’t require the government to expand and regulate. Where there are regulations, they are trying to make them make sense and use them in the public interest. They’ve worked to eliminate fraud and waste, which Dems try to sell as cutting benefits. Sure, to people who are cheating or not eligible. And Republicans stood firm on not letting the progs hijack a simple, clean budget extension to waste over a trillion dollars on partisan priorities.
Obama used a shutdown to try to pass ObamaCare. For two weeks, the government was on ice. Trump and Republicans used it to prevent unnecessary partisan spending and, in the interest of restoring more transparent and proper budgetary procedures (no more omnibus bills).
