Washington — Pfizer has agreed to offer significantly discounted prices for some prescription drugs for all American consumers and has committed to offer prescription medications to Medicaid at lower prices, President Trump announced Tuesday. The president said the drugs will be available for purchase online on a website operated by the federal government, which the White House has said will be called “TrumpRx.”
“Today, I’m thrilled to announce that one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers and one of the best anywhere in the world, Pfizer, has agreed to offer countless prescription medications at major discounts in the United States, a result of the ‘most favored nation’ drug pricing order that we established earlier this year,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who was in the Oval Office with the president for the announcement, said Mr. Trump’s threat of 100% tariffs on drugs manufactured outside the U.S. motivated his company to take swift action. The president said Pfizer’s drug prices will be lower starting “immediately.”
The president said the cost of some Pfizer drugs could see decreases in price of 50%-100%. Mr. Trump said this would save American consumers and taxpayers “hundreds of millions of dollars a year.” The president said Americans have been “subsidizing research and development costs for the entire planet” because of the higher prices they have been paying.
“We’re also announcing that moving forward, all new medications introduced by Pfizer to the American market will be sold at the reduced ‘most favored nation’ cost,” the president added. “So, we’ll be paying essentially what other countries are paying, who have been much lower — much, much lower for many, many years.”
Neither Pfizer nor the White House have released specific drug prices yet.
Some health policy experts cautioned that pricing details are still unclear and the impact for consumers may be limited. Darius Lakdawalla, chief scientific officer at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center, pointed out that Medicaid’s prices are already lower than average in the U.S.
“Medicaid already enjoys ‘best-price’ protection in the sense that they receive the lowest prices charged to any commercial payer in the United States. Therefore, we are starting out at prices well below the averages seen in the U.S. market,” he told CBS News.
And those patients have been benefiting, says Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization: “It is still very unclear how the price reductions announced today will lower costs directly for many people, since people on Medicaid typically don’t pay large amounts out of pocket for drugs.”
Sean Sullivan, a health economist at the University of Washington, said: “The direct-to-patient stuff is, in my view, a sideshow and branding opportunity for Trump. Most patients have drug coverage. … Very few are going to buy medications with cash, unless the drug is not a covered benefit, like weight loss or erectile dysfunction drugs.”
Bourla called it a “historic cay” because the agreement would be reversing an “unfair situation.”
“For years, other rich nations refused to pay their fair share for medical innovation,” Bourla said. “And as a result, Americans had to assume disproportionate costs.”
The Pfizer agreement is a part of the White House agenda to secure “most favored nation” pricing with pharmaceutical manufacturers. In May, Mr. Trump signed an executive order calling on drugmakers to lower their prices and bring them in line with what other high-income countries pay for the same drugs. He threatened to subject them to steep caps on how much they can earn from Medicare if they failed to do so.
Monday was the deadline for drugmakers to reach agreements to bring down drug costs, the Post reported, after the president’s May executive order. While the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population and uses about 13% of the world’s prescription drugs, the U.S. funds over 70% of global pharmaceutical profits, according to the White House.
The president’s announcement comes days after he announced that on Wednesday, the U.S. would begin imposing a 100% tariff on any branded or patented pharmaceutical product “unless a Company IS BUILDING their Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plant in America.” That move could increase the costs of some drugs for consumers.
Bourla mentioned the impending tariffs in his comments Tuesday, saying the tariffs had motivated his company. He said the Mr. Trump gave Pfizer a three-year grace period on the tariffs, and the tariffs would be inapplicable, as long as Pfizer manufactures in the U.S. As a part of the agreement, Bourla said Pfizer agreed to move their production of medicines used in America to the U.S.
“The president is absolutely right, tariff is the most powerful tool to motivate behaviors, Mr. President,” Bourla said. “And clearly motivated ours, right?”
Mr. Trump also said the tariffs had “played a big role” in the deal.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said more details of agreements by pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices will come this fall. Mr. Trump echoed that point, saying other companies are on board, too.
“President Trump is doing more to lower healthcare costs than anyone else in Washington, D.C.,” said White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai ahead of the president’s announcement. “While Democrats are threatening to shut down the government to subsidize health care for illegal aliens, President Trump is leveraging the power of the federal government to drastically cut drug prices for everyday Americans. Democrats talked the talk for decades about drug prices, but only President Trump is actually walking the walk.”
The details of the “TrumpRx” website have not yet been shared, but a senior administration official expected the website to be live in early 2026.
The announcement comes as Democrats remain at an impasse with the president and Republicans over keeping the government funded beyond midnight: they say the president is not doing enough to lower health care prices, and they’ve been pushing for an extension of the Affordable Care Act before premiums increase for many who have health care through the ACA.
contributed to this report.
