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A Big Pharma bait-and-switch.

The pharmaceutical sales business has come a long way since the days when traveling medicine shows toured rural America selling fraudulent patent medicines. For “Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” a medication that gave us the expression “snake oil,” fast-talking hucksters would stand on a horse-drawn wagon and tell the crowd that their simple mixture of turpentine and red pepper was harvested from Chinese water snakes.

To be clear, the Trump administration’s drug purchasing website doesn’t sell phony nostrums. The “TrumpRx” scam is in the premise, not the product. Trump claims that he has negotiated special deals with the drug companies that lower costs for working Americans and has created an easy way to purchase them online. Don’t believe the hype. The prices resemble what the manufacturers were likely to charge anyway, given market pressures, and they were already developing online “direct-to-consumer” channels themselves.

The White House has nevertheless made extravagant claims about TrumpRx in press releases, and in statements from Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, and other officials. Visitors to the website are even greeted by a banner that reads, “$700,000,000 Saved for Americans.” Kennedy didn’t provide any evidence for that figure when pressed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. He almost certainly couldn’t. Many TrumpRx prices were already available elsewhere, often through GoodRx, an already existing drug purchasing portal that serves as a partial “back room” for the website. Other prices are higher than customers are charged in many other Western countries.

TrumpRx is a major boon to the drug industry. It helps drug manufacturers retain their patent-driven market strangleholds. TrumpRx’s “direct-to-consumer” model, like their own, gives them full control of the purchasing relationship and bypasses most external oversight. Meanwhile, they can pretend to negotiate while still reaping exorbitant profits. For GLP-1s, for example, that means charging hundreds of dollars a month for medications that could be manufactured for........

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