Dr.Makary: TrumpRx Is the Beginning of a New Chapter in American Healthcare

TRANSCRIPT:

MAKARY: "Well, first of all, the co-pays and deductibles are going up each year in health care because no one has been able to control the out of — spiraling costs, and so what you’re actually seeing is a phenomenon in the United States where the cash price is below the co-pay. And remember pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs, which is an arm of the insurance companies, have many shell games to skim money off the top. So by going direct and buying the drug from those who make the drug, this is ushering in a new era in healthcare. TrumpRx is the beginning of a new chapter in American health care, where for the first time you can buy the drug free, those who make it, because those who make it had been complaining about the many middlemen in health care that have been siphoning billions out of the system. And this has been my area in health policy research when I was at Johns Hopkins. The amount of money games that go on with healthcare’s middlemen, which is a function of the complexity of the system, are unbelievable- And so you’ve got 40 drugs on TrumpRx right now, that’s going to increase. Some of these drugs are the highest-spend drugs in the United States, some of them are not covered by insurance, and hopefully insurance is gonna evolve and change their coverage decisions to allow people to get a better deal because they would be saving money."