Trump: "A friend of mine who is a businessman. Very very very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him. Highly neurotic. Brilliant businessman. Seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug." pic.twitter.com/pFFyXT6pHF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 12, 2025
May 12, 2025
Big shot takes fat shot.
Posts
87 comments:
“It’s not working.”
Lol
"Shot" is one of those rare words that seems to have endless possible meanings and uses. It's a good word, a very useful and effective word, a really great word, one of our greatest words.
Absolutely, Mr. President. Pharmaceuticals are incredibly easy to transport, so you would think that there would be -very- free trade of them. But the regulatory barriers made American pharma a good bit of money- until, perhaps, now.
$88 vs $1300? Holy shots!
The correct response is: "Go and look into what your taxes would be if you were living in London, and get back to me on whether you think that drug is really only $88."
The Hegemon Man's Burden.
If the price was $88 everywhere would the drug even exist?
I think it would, but maybe not.
A woman can never be too rich or too thin--Wallis Simpson
We expect them to go together in the US.
bagoh20,
No no no no no! Pharma development is extremely expensive, you get to spend tons of money up front for quite a while before you find out if the thing you are researching is even a valid potential product.
I do not mean in any way to defend the bad behavior of some of the pharmaceutical corporations, but quoting (from memory) pharma research chemist Derek Lowe: "I have made many millions of my employers' dollars disappear without once getting even close to a salable product." The US basically funds pharma research for the entire rest of the world.
"If the price was $88 everywhere would the drug even exist? I think it would, but maybe not."
This is the thing that so frequently gets missed in the prescription drug pricing debates. US customers pay a price that covers the development of the drug and the rest of the world gets to pay merely the production cost plus a modest profit. Now, when the beneficiaries of our defacto largess are, say, sub-Saharan Africa, okay, I guess I'm inclined to be charitable, but not for f***-in EUROPE (or CANADA for that matter). It's a real problem. It's time they paid their share.
The US basically funds pharma research for the entire rest of the world.
@Mirk Parker, very, very true.
you can count on tractor rupar, to miss the whole point,
Can’t wait for the progressives to figure out how to defend big pharmaceutical corporations on this one.
The media will give them something stupid to say. I am actually curious how stupid this criticism of Trump will be.
Trump’s actual policies measured 10 years ago would be about 70% democrat party planks.
People on the left have a hard time understanding how the uniparty used the Republican democrat dichotomy to push the globalist agenda dividing these issues up between the two parties and always compromising on the side of the globalist oligarchs. Republicans pushed wars and tax cuts for the wealthy democrats pushed abortion and the regulation’s on oligarch competition in the us. Both parties pushed for amnesty and importation of cheap labor and both parties pushed for free trade.
Republican voters figured this out and Trump was in the right place at the right time.
Republican voters are just smarter than democrat voters.
Aaron Rupar?!?! F**k me runnin’…
hes only worth the full muntz, iman,
Couldn’t be a more egregious POS site than Aaron Rupar.
I am also curious why the title of the post was stolen from pornhub.
medias touch, is another den of scum and villainy,
Someone on X was blaming boomers for all the immigration, but we never had the chance to vote against it until Trump. We did stop W's proposed "reform" (amnesty).
joe numb nutz walsh, there is a whole slew of them
“It’s not working” 😂
The shot is $88 dollars in the UK because the NHS buys all of it and that is the contract they negotiated. That's why pharmaceuticals are so much cheaper in other countries--a single entity contracts to buy a huge quantity.
The system works because the United States makes up the difference. Basically, Americans subsidize everybody else by paying for the research costs they won't.
If the US demands the same price others get so that we all share the development costs fairly, it wouldn't be $88. But it would be a lot less than Americans are paying now (and everyone else would pay more).
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2025/05/12/lets-revisit-the-tariff-doom-and-gloom-that-elizabeth-warren-was-predicting-1-month-ago-n2412685
That is DJT at his very best. Rather than bring out some nerdy bureaucrat or medical economist or some guy in a lab coat to explain what he's going to do, DJT tells a very relatable anecdote about someone who's a friend of his and so it immediately connects in people's mind in a different way than a typical press briefing would. A+ for DJT today!
We could make America healthy, again. We could make America competitive, again. We could enforce the law with jail time. We could entertain abortive ideation, too. Choices.
of course ozempic basically consumes muscle mass, which is detrimental, in the long run
If the US demands the same price others get so that we all share the development costs fairly, it wouldn't be $88. But it would be a lot less than Americans are paying now (and everyone else would pay more).
Yes. And that is a much fairer system to Americans than the twisted way it developed up until now.
Now do tort reform
As Ficta points out, the fact that the USA public/private health insurance guarantees the recovery of Big Pharma's R&D for patented drugs (along with the cost of R&D that doesn't pan out) allows the rest of the world to free ride on that R&D. Just part of the post-WWII burdens (e.g., defense of Europe, Japan South Korea, and allowing lopsided trade deals to rebuild their economies) that the US Establishment imposed on US taxpayers, workers and businesses. That's what the hell's going on!
...yes, we are wealthier per capita than most other places and so we subsidize other places where per capita wealth and income are lower. The pharmas price based on the optimal point on each nation's s/d curve, even if it means not supplying the drug to many places...I'm curious to learn how famous fat friend has price discovery on the cost of the drug here or why he believes he has price discovery. Is that 1.8K his out of pocket or something written on a bill he doesn't pay? My s/o used to get $100,000 MRIs every six months according to the hospital. You pay $40 they also say...
haha. Elon for sure.
Did he pay out of pocket? Or does he have insurance with a deductible and max out of pocket deductible? With the latter, I’ve seen such wild price fluctuations each new fiscal year.
Healthcare systems in Europe tend to be centralized, resulting in central negotiations at a lower price.
Healthcare systems in the US are decentralized, resulting in decentralized negotiations at a higher price. That said, a decentralized, private sector system does come with many benefits. Although in health care, these benefits tend to be more for shareholders than customers.
As a bit of background, in 2003, when Congress established the Medicare Part D prescription drug program for seniors, the lead negotiator in the House of Representatives, a Representative from Louisiana, Democrat-turned-Republican Billy Tauzin, worked to ensure that price negotiations for the drugs were divided between private insurance providers.
At the time, the cost to taxpayers of this move was estimated to be an extra $8 billion expenditures a year (versus a more centralized and cost effective system).
Not surprisingly, Billy Tauzin, resigned from Congress roughly a month after the legislation became law, and took a new job as the head of the pharma lobby in DC, earning $2 million a year (a 10 fold increase in his salary). At the time, his case was a mini-scandal highlighting the corruption in the American political system. These days with a president raking in hundreds of millions in crypto scams, it almost seems quaint.
However, if you want to understand the rot in the U.S. political system, the Tauzin example is a helpful example.
A friend of ours, one of the godfathers of process automation, whose wife was insulin dependent once said, "they'll never cure diabetes there's too much profit".
He later automated a product line for a famous Pharma corporation in Darkisland's back yard. His quote then was "If they want more all they have to do is punch it in."
There's a new and improved FREE drug on the market.
100% available.
No animals tortured.
No government BS/ loopholes.medicare obamacare crapola.
Walk the body. It's free!
Dr. Oz was very effective in that announcement. Charts and passion are a winning combination.
Turns out the oft-touted Biden drug price drops locked in the up to 4x cost, mostly 3x cost, to US citizens. Trump/Kennedy's plan levels it all out globally. Over the next 30 days, negotiations w Big Pharma on the new pricing, many of whom have expected this to happen for a long time.
Can't deny that Trump has our collective back.
Maybe the solution is to require pharmas to sell the drugs at the same price and quantity within the U.S. as they do without. So if the British national health negotiates a deal where they buy 10 million doses of a given drug for $50/dose, the company has to make an equivalent 10 million doses available on the U.S. market for the same price. This would continue to apply to whatever quantity the French buy, or Germans, etc. Once all of the foreign deals were matched in this fashion, then if there's any remaining U.S. demand, the companies could basically charge whatever the market will bear.
At first I thought he was talking about JB.
Political Junkie said...
"At first I thought he was talking about JB."
If only we could keep him from eating Illinois children.
"Trump’s actual policies measured 10 years ago would be about 70% democrat party planks."
True. It's why I'll never vote for another MAGA candidate. And I agree that it's funny to see Democrats arguing against their own policies.
I can't help but think that a lot of price fixing here in the US is because of third party interference. IE; Insurance companies and hospitals. What would the street price be for Ozympic?
It would be helpful to have some experts weigh in on the likely implications of this executive order.
As reported it is unclear to me how this works. Are pharmacy benefit managers (i.e. the middlemen) being squeezed out with these direct to consumer sales? Do pharma companies already have direct to consumer sales arrangements in place and ready to go?
What happens if the EU opts to keep its existing price schedule in place? If EU countries agree to pay higher prices what mechanisms are available to ensure that savings are passed along to U.S. customers, and not just added to the profit line?
As with so many things connected to this president, it is hard to discern what is just noise and what is actually a tangible shift in policy. How likely is this executive order to survive a court challenge? Why did Trump opt for an executive order rather than legislation?
My initial read on this is that Trump is making this announcement in the hope that a positive headline will improve his favorability numbers.
However, if people don't actually see reduced drug prices, the actual impact of his executive order is unlikely to salvage Trump's poor favorability ratings. It will just be another blip in the news cycle.
How likely is it that the executive order will have any real world impact? Unclear from the story. Pharma share prices are up, it looks like pharmacy benefit managers, like CVS and Cigna, are down on the announcement.
Hopefully there is more follow-up reporting.
In Trump's first term, he was proposing transparency in medical billing. I am hoping that this work with drug pricing is his first step toward that end.
The scam that is the Affordable Care Act really hurts the quality of medical care in the US, and the only way to take it apart is going to be by forcing transparency in the pricing structures so that the people that are paying, the supposed 'insured', can get good and mad at how badly they're being ripped when it comes to getting medical care. I say 'ripped', but I really mean a word that is similar but with a different vowel.
If the US pays the same price other countries currently pay, the result would probably be a lot less development of drugs. However, Trump is always negotiating. This is just his opening negotiation position.
"As with so many things connected to this president, it is hard to discern what is just noise and what is actually a tangible shift in policy...."
Unlike the previous one, where we just had to accept that we were getting 100% lies, promoted by the reporters whose card Joe was holding. Like for example, the 'jobs numbers'.
It's occurred to me more than once, that Trump's almost daily Q&A's with the press are a way of giving them more information directly from the source, than they can easily offset with their own propaganda branding. You have noticed that the density of coverage has ramped up under Trump, haven't you? More reporting, more stories, more coverage, etc etc?
This administration sets a tone of clear policy direction with its communications. I think the approach is to obscure the Trump administration's actual spoken words, using sheer volume dilution with dirty propaganda dishwater to dilute the message and keep the picture opaque. Can't allow the voters to see progress !
The problem is that it costs $1-2 billion to make the first dose (R&D, including 100s of failed attempts for every one that goese to testing, testing, regulatory approval, building plants, and so on)
These are called "Fixed costs" (sort of synonomous with "overhead")
It may cost less than a dollar to make the second to the second billionth dose. (Raw materials, labor, energy and so on). These are called variable costs.
The company that incurred the fixed costs has to build them into the price of each dose or go bankrupt.
If Canada decides that Ozempic is too expensive, they can make it themselves pretty cheaply because much of the heavy lifting (the fixed costs) have already been taken care of. They mainly need to pay the variable costs.
So, as Canada did in the 90s, they can say "Fuck you, US Pharmaco. If you don't give us the drug for cheap, basically variable cost plus a bit, we'll make it ourselves and you can shake your fist at the sky."
THAT is why US drugs are so cheap in other countries.
In the 90s we had Clinton and he caved. Now we have Trump and if Canada tries this he will bring a world of hurt on them.
Canada is not the only one, of course.
So what I expect will happen is that the rest of the world will be asked to pay closer to full cost for US drugs. This will allow US prices to be decreased and other countries pick up the slack.
Obviously MUCH more complex than above but that is the Dummies version.
I published an article about drug prices and why they are so high last month. Talk about perfect timing! See it here. https://www.packagingdigest.com/pharmaceutical-packaging/here-s-why-drug-costs-are-so-high
John Henry
GOP is either MAGA or Cheney-Kristol
Make America Great isn't perfect... but I'll vote for it over Cheney-Kristol frauds... each an d every time.
I'm sure he has a plan to address it short-term because he has talked about long term solutions but what about supply?
We make a lot of finished drugs in the us but a huge amount of the Apis (active pharmaceutical ingredients) are imported. 80% or more for many of the most important therapeutics.
What happens if India or China say they won't export ais to us unless we give them a good price?
How long could we survive if our supply of antibiotics is shut do, for example?
I
Scott Adams talked about drug pricing in his podcast today. He directed his listeners to listen to Mark Cuban on the subject.
Mark Cuban provides prescription drugs in the US through the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company.
This is the reason drugs are so expensive in the US according to him:
“He identifies PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) as the Primary Culprit: Cuban identifies PBMs as a major problem in the pharmaceutical supply chain, arguing they distort pricing and prioritize profits over patient welfare. He has stated that PBMs “work so hard to distort pricing” through opaque contracts that prohibit disclosure, which he sees as a barrier to fair pricing. He believes PBMs’ control over formularies—lists of covered drugs—gives them undue leverage over manufacturers and pharmacies, often excluding beneficial medications like Zepbound for financial gain rather than clinical value.
Cuban emphasizes that the pharmaceutical industry’s lack of transparency, perpetuated by middlemen, is a core issue. He notes that PBMs and wholesalers create an “inefficient market” where drug prices are nearly impossible to determine.“
(summary provided by Grok)
Did somebody say drugs?
John Henry is right; Mark Cuban is wrong.
Anybody surprised?
I appreciate John's caution that it's a fairly complicated scenario. The simplest solutions, such as just requiring pharma to charge the same price in the US as it does elsewhere, might cause much of the pharma development to flee the US and that might not be such a good thing.
That is to say, Cuban is not wrong that opaque pricing is a bad thing, but he's desperately wrong to think that is the main part of the problem.
There are cheaper knock off drugs already. India is a primary supplier of them. They sell to US customers, among others.
US customers pay a price that covers the development of the drug and the rest of the world gets to pay merely the production cost plus a modest profit. Now, when the beneficiaries of our defacto largess are, say, sub-Saharan Africa, okay, I guess I'm inclined to be charitable, but not for f***-in EUROPE (or CANADA for that matter). It's a real problem. It's time they paid their share.
Don't also forget that this gigantic charitable "gift" by the American taxpayer is what enables the wonders of "socialized medicine" in other countries.
I've not listened to Adams yet but will tonight. I suspect Cuban is right about the logistics and costs of getting drugs to the consumer.
Cuban and I can both be right.
The drug market is totally screwed.
I
Thank you, Ficta.
We were promised a cure for type 1 diabetes in the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties -- then type 2, a usually preventable disease that was pandered to by the pharm companies and paid for largely by taxes due to the demographics, skyrocketed, as did the price of insulin. Talk of curing type 1 disappeared in the gluttonous payday that was type 2, rather than keeping it under control with diet, which is impossible with the genetic type 1.
Bringing prescription drug prices down, ended World War 7-11, closed the border down tight… what’s next for Trump!?!?
Phase 2 to reduce drug costs is to streamline development costs so that companies don't need to spend billions upon billions of dollars to get new patented drugs approved that are only marginally better than the ones now generic.
If the cost of drug development were lower we would see more drugs being tested and evaluated. Research and development is artificially way too expensive part of it is the high overhead burden of academic development and then you have regulatory compliance inertia that not only slows down the process to a crawl but makes it enormously complicated without increasing the efficacy or safety.
Trump could declare a medical emergency in the United States to justify implementing operation warp speed for everything all the time.
Amazingly, Trump doesn't know that Elon Musk gets shots of Mounjaro, a GLP-1 inhibitor to keep himself thinner than The Don!
"The shot is $88 dollars in the UK because the NHS buys all of it and that is the contract they negotiated. That's why pharmaceuticals are so much cheaper in other countries--a single entity contracts to buy a huge quantity."
This is called monopsony.
It is like a monopoly but on the buying side, and its just as bad as a monopoly. And libertarians and free marketeers should be happy to see a tool to be used against it.
Or as I describe this "Europe can put on their big boy pants and pay for research like a real OECD country should."
Switzerland is moving closer to securing a trade deal with the U.S. that could bring relief to Swiss watchmakers stung by tariffs.
Woo hoo for me…
AI could very well revolutionize the pharma R&D effort.
John Henry,
You and he can't both be right about the primary cause unless you both say the same cause is primary.
Do we know what NHS pays for the drug, as opposed to what they charge for it? I’ve read on their website that they recover on average 10% of the cost of prescriptions, so the rest is covered by taxpayers. If NHS pays $500-$1000 for the fat drug and charges only $88 for it, then taxpayers are in the hook for the rest. Hence my comment up thread on what he’d have to pay in taxes in the UK for the privilege of getting the low prescription price.
John Henry could join Marco Rubio negotiating peace around the world. Kirk Parker not so much. Note to Kirk: he was being nice.
Semaglutide was going for about $150 per month from compounding pharmacies until just recently, when the price jumped to about $300. Compare that to Ozempic at something like $1500 per month (same exact compound, but Ozempic has a clever dosing thingy, whereas with the generic semaglutide the patient has to fill the syringe the proper amount). There is the issue of: do you trust some compounding pharmacy, because who knows where their chemical and biological stock comes from (actually, we all know it's China and India, but quality can be, um, variable).
But it's puzzling that if someone is approved, insurance will pay for gold-plated Ozempic but won't pay for the compounded version.
The whole system is a dog's breakfast of conflicting practices and illogical rules.
Biden’s bigger health care initiatives, such as a $35 monthly cap on insulin, a $2,000 annual out-of-pocket cap on prescription drugs and Medicare’s negotiating drug pricing provision weren’t affected by Trump’s executive actions Monday. How about spending time trying to get legislation instead of all these smoke and mirror EO'S. Trumps nitwit health guy looking around for a cure for measles. FOR REAL! wtf...
Is DJT retarded? He sounds like a first grader that just heard from another first grader that Santa is fake.
Folks that are part of the DJT cult must be suffering from some sort of mental illness. It's SAD! to see these folks w/ broken brains.
$1300 is too high. $88 is too low.
$150 is just right. ~ Goldilocks (not my real name)
"Is DJT retarded? He sounds like a first grader that just heard from another first grader that Santa is fake."
What Presidential candidate or President impressed you with their rhetoric?
This is interesting. things that make you go hmmm.
"What Presidential candidate or President impressed you with their rhetoric?"
I liked the BHO thing he said when he wasn't reading a speech and he didn't know he was being recorded. Read the whole thing, and see that he uses "or" not "and." And, see that there is more than religion or guns. And, see that he's talking about folks that have been F-ed by a bunch of politician liars:
But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.
"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Soaring rhetoric that leads to insider pocket stuffing... Does not impress me. BHO - thumbs down, man.
le dieudieu loved the lofty rhetoric, which was recognized as pure, unadulterated bullschiff by sentient folks.
I bet he never counted the number of “I ME MINE”s in all that soaring loftiness.
Fuck you, Iman. I forgot to add: so my type 1 immediate family is all dead now, despite years of inhuman discipline. Good on Trump. Good on Kennedy. Lazy bastards probably like your family suck up all the tax money.
Howard and Aaron are right.
Regarding Ozembic:
“Studies show that during weight loss with GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide, about 60-75% of the weight lost is fat mass, and 25-40% is lean mass (which includes muscle, water, and other tissues). This is similar to weight loss from calorie restriction alone. A 2021 study in The New England Journal of Medicine on semaglutide for obesity found significant weight loss, with body composition analyses indicating lean mass loss proportional to overall weight reduction.”(Grok)
“Some studies suggest GLP-1 agonists may have neutral or even positive effects on muscle function in specific contexts (e.g., improving insulin sensitivity in muscle tissue). However, long-term data on muscle mass preservation during extended Ozempic use is limited, as most trials focus on weight loss or glycemic control over 1-2 years.” (Grok)
I can’t imagine I wrote anything that would’ve set you off, Tina Trent. Care to point it out?
There are a few of us here with direct experience in the process of bringing a new molecular entity to market. A person without such experience might underestimate the difficulty. And then there are the people who believe they just deserve it an affordable price or even for free, because reasons. Or think that it’s unfair for pharmaceutical companies to practice capitalism because reasons. John Henry KNOWS what he is talking about. Mark Cuban is talking about what someone told him.
“Mark Cuban is talking about what som’eone told him.”
He’s the Co-founder and CEO (launched in 2022 with Dr. Alex Oshmyansky).of acompany which aims to lower prescription drug costs by bypassing pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and offering generic medications at transparent prices (cost plus a 15% markup, a $5 pharmacy fee, and a $5 shipping fee).
His company offers over 2,500 generic medications, serving more than 2 million members.”
@Iman: Tourettes?
I didn’t think of that, Eva Marie, but you may be right .
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