The Trump administration is taking a victory lap for lowering the cost of injectable weight loss drugs. Starting in January, Americans can purchase GLP-1s at a substantial discount through the TrumpRx.gov website. Even lower costs will be available to some Medicare beneficiaries starting around mid-year.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services followed up this development by announcing that it would reduce Medicare payments per dose for Ozempic, Rybelsus, and Wegovy by 71% in 2027.
President Donald Trump deserves credit for recognizing the affordability crisis — and the potential political crisis it portends for Republicans in 11 months. But even before his policy breakthrough, market forces had lowered GLP-1 prices several times over through competition and price signals.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen pharma giants locked in the best kind of contest: a price-cutting competition. At the beginning of December, Eli Lilly reduced the price of Zepbound on its direct-to-consumer platform. It made this decision after CVS Health’s drug benefit plan dropped Zepbound in favor of Novo Nordisk’s less expensive competitor, Wegovy.
“Our move earlier this year to negotiate Lilly and Novo against one another drove significant savings for our clients," said a CVS spokesman. The pharmacy benefit manager understood that its customers wanted lower prices for the medications they use at unprecedented rates and met their demands.
But that’s not all. Novo Nordisk recently announced that it would start selling Wegovy for $349 and Ozempic for $499 a month — a dramatic reduction from previous retail prices of $1,600 and $1,300. The move followed Eli Lilly’s dramatic seizure of market share. After overtaking its rival earlier this year, Zepbound was prescribed nearly twice as often as Wegovy in October.
Whether they are driven by the public or the private sectors, pharmaceutical cost reductions matter to the 42 million Americans taking GLP-1 drugs as part of a weight loss regimen. The policies and price updates are complex, but the takeaway is simple: Competition brings down prices. Together, they show what can happen when demand is strong and multiple players — public and private — respond. Free-market economists know that manufacturers do not merely react to market signals without reference to policy statements. The Trump administration set its sights on fixing skyrocketing out-of-pocket pharmaceutical costs.
“The rapid growth in spending for drugs used to treat diabetes and obesity contributed to faster overall growth in retail prescription drug expenditures,” reported CMS. Drugmakers and foreign governments alike listened when President Trump noted that American citizens “pay massively higher prices than other nations pay for the same exact pill, from the same factory, effectively subsidizing socialism abroad.”
But unlike the government, the free market delivered immediate relief. There was no regulatory process to navigate, no public comment period, no waiting for a new website’s launch in 2026. In contrast to the glacial pace of government action, the market reacts to consumer price signals and competitive positioning in real time.
At their core, markets produce faster adjustments, because the people making decisions are directly impacted by the outcomes. Employers care about costs, manufacturers care about revenue, and benefits managers care about demand charts. All three must react immediately or lose customers. Novo saw an opportunity to gain market share, and Lilly recalibrated its strategy — because that is how companies behave when buyers shift their preferences.
Free markets move at the pace of consumer demand, not based on political calendars. Rather than vesting authority in a single executive or executive branch negotiation process, competition allows many decision-makers to signal what works and what does not. Free markets reward companies that innovate, compete, and respond to buyers. And they penalize those that do not.
Markets simply operate on different principles than governments. Prices respond to active competition and clear incentives. Manufacturers cannot ignore employers and large drug plans. Purchasers cannot tune out their beneficiaries’ demands. And no one can turn a blind eye to a blockbuster drug category growing as quickly as GLP-1s.
When these interests intersect, even in an industry as consolidated as pharmaceuticals, change can happen without a directive from Washington. “[T]he law of the market,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, reflects “consumers’ sovereignty,” with big corporations acting as “trustees of the consumers, revocably appointed by an election daily repeated.” CEOs don’t like losing elections any more than the architects of Crossfire Hurricane.
The president deserves credit for taking positive action. But analysts must remember that government action represents the slowest, most clogged lane on the highway. The market remains the expressway. And the people who need to get healthier can’t keep waiting for Washington to deliver the goods.
Rev. Ben Johnson is an Eastern Orthodox priest and conservative writer/editor. His views are his own.
