Americans Will Get Diabetes and Asthma Drugs Up to 70% Cheaper, Trump executive order helped too

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There's some good news for diabetes and asthma patients living in the United States because some of the drug prices are finally coming down and one of the biggest announcements regarding this, came out this week from AstraZeneca.

The company has announced that they will start selling two of their most important medicines directly to American patients at prices that are much lower than before.

This will take effect from October 1, 2025. The drugs in particular are the diabetes drug Farxiga which will be offered for $182 to the patients who do not have good insurance and there's quite a number of those so it'll help a lot.

That price is actually around 70 percent lower than its official U.S. list price. Getting a 70% discount on a product this important is almost a miracle.

Also, AstraZeneca’s asthma drug Airsupra will now be sold for $249 and that one is about half of the normal cost.

People that are on Medicare and Medicaid will also be able to pay these lower prices starting in January of 2026. I wish it was even sooner but policies and drastic price changes of this magnitude would probably take a while.

The company has decided to launch a new program they call AstraZeneca Direct. This program is designed to allow patients to order medicine from a website and have it delivered to their homes.

What's the advantage of this? It's pretty obvious, because by selling directly, the company is cutting out pharmacies, insurance companies and the pharmacy benefit managers that President Donald Trump usually accuses of driving up costs. I couldn't agree more with him.

Sometimes before a drug gets to a patient, the price would have been ridiculously inflated by different chains of businesses. The pharmacies try to over profit sometimes and because they know it's medicine, in this kind of business, the customer is usually desperate and would have to pay even if it's inconvenient and sometimes ridiculous.

The company put out a statement explaining that this new service they've started is designed to help people who already have prescriptions but cannot afford their medicine under the current system.

So was the timing of this decision a mere accident or did it really have something to do with president Trump?

Back in July of this year, President Trump sent letters to major drug companies demanding that they lower U.S. prices to be closer to those in other wealthy countries, where the same drugs usually cost two or three times less.

He put pressure on them and gave them until the end of September to act. We're at the end of September and AstraZeneca’s announcement came just three days before that deadline Trump set.

Trump has also issued an executive order calling for more direct to patient drug sales and he also recently announced new import tariffs on prescription drugs.

Some may not agree with certain decisions made by president Trump but not all is bad, this is actually going to benefit some patients when the prices go down.

This Trump pressure has created a situation where pharmaceutical companies are moving quickly to show to the government that they are willing to cut prices. Not doing so could lead to consequences and I'm pretty sure they are all aware of what Trump was capable of doing to Elon when they had their personal banter. (Not trying to connect the two stories anyways).

AstraZeneca is not the only company doing this. Other companies like Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have also launched programs that allow patients to buy medicine directly. We hope for new decisions like this to be made world wide.

Medication is vital, way too important to make them expensive. We can understand that the making of the drug doesn't come cheap but anything that can be done to lower the price of drugs is a good thing for everyone.

In as much as AstraZeneca is not the only company making these decisions, their decision stands out because of the scale of the discounts and the importance of the drugs involved.

Farxiga alone made $7.7 billion in global sales last year and is one of the company’s top products, so to put a discount on that would be a lot of money lost but the value of a life is worth more than money, if only most corporate millionaires and billionaires appreciated that.

Airsupra is a newer product but is seen as a very important treatment in respiratory medicine. So by offering both of these drugs at large discounts, hopefully that sets a good example for the rest of the industry to follow.

Besides the discounts, the company is also strengthening its presence in the United States in some other ways. This is a promise so we cannot guarantee for now but the company promised to invest $50 billion by 2030. That would include construction of a massive new factory in Virginia, which would be its biggest single manufacturing project in the world.

We look forward to the rest of the world following this, of course relatively speaking, some parts of the world already do sell drugs cheaper than in the United States but it's good news that Americans will now have a chance to pay much less for vital medicine.

You may have opposing opinions but I believe that president Trump’s push for lower drug prices was arguably a major reason why this happened.

Screenshot of Trump from news on his announcement to sign executive order that aims to cut drug prices