Drug Price Insanity: How is this even possible?
GoodRx provides a wonderful service. A simple Google search will reveal the prices charged at local pharmacies. The price extremes are often gigantic.
Consider the generic for the cholesterol drug Crestor, Rosuvastatin. The results are typical for generic prices.
90 pills of Rosuvastatin 10 mg generic vary from less than $20 to more than $200, depending on where you fill the prescription.
Pause…. Read it again.
You can pay less than $20 to fill it at a grocery store pharmacy… or.. You can spend over $200 at Walgreens. That’s a factor of more than ten!
How is that even possible? These are all large stores with the ability to negotiate prices with wholesalers, yet that clearly does not matter.
In general, the trend is generics run many orders of magnitude (ten times or more) at CVS and Walgreens compared to your convenient grocery store pharmacy.
How is that okay?
Of course Walgreen is the price outlier. Is anyone surprised? I don’t know what part of the country the author resides, but I know I would see very similar numbers in my area, with WalMart, Kroger, Safeway prices down to Earth, and Walgreen prices up in the stratosphere.
I prescrived oral Lamisil for onychomycosis and got a preauthorization request. At the time, the drug was on a WalMart four dollar price list, and most other pharmacies were the same or close. Next thing I knew, I got a preauthorization request. A preauth for a four dollar prescription? I checked. Walgreen. So I had to call. Sure enough, they were charging EIHTY DOLLARS for a prescription that was around four dollars everywhere else.
Remember when Walgreen sent those multipage questionnaires for any patient you had on Suboxone? They claimed “IT’S THE LAW”, a blatant lie, or all the other area pharmacies were breaking the law, since Walgreen was the only pharmacy doing it. Multipage intrusive questions on the patient’s drug history, treatment history, psych, counseling, etc. Claiming it was needed to prove a “valid prescription”.
It came out it was their own malfeasance. They got fined by the DEA. The usual corporate over-reaction, placing the burden on the doctors. I told my patients to stay the hell away from Walgreen, To this day, I steer my patients away from Walgreen.
Honestly, I don’t understand how they survive the way they do business. If it were truly a free market, they would have gone bankrupt years ago.
I understand why they want their nurse practitioner walk-in clinics, so they have someone they can control.
Want to see impossible. Here is a drug that costs from over $170-$700 that used to cost a fraction of today’s price. It has paid for itself millions of times over. It has been around for 50 or more years and I wrote it 45 years ago in family practice. Good old LIBRAX averages about $500 on GoodRx. Figure that out.
Librax is chlordiazepoxide and clidinium. As far as I can tell clidinium has no other use except to make Lbirax. If you really want to use a combination of benzos and an antcholinergic you could prescribe two different components for around 20 bucks. i haven’t seen that combination used for some time though.
This was way back in the late 1990’s. My state Medicaid sent a mass mailing asking the docs to stay away from lorazepam, chlorazepate, I think a couple other benzos. They described a massive price increase, tenfold, fiftyfold, some staggering number. Not ALL benzos, but a few select generics. Diazepam was still OK as I recall. I couldn’t believe it. I shot the parmacy director an E-mail, and he kingly replied with the back story.
Price-fixing by Mylan, a generic drug manufacturer, out of Pittsburgh if I remember correctly.
It’s been a classic story. It’s so hard to build a new generic drug factory in the USA. So the generic manufacturer buys up the factories making a certain generic. When they have all the generic manufacturers, they close mose of them, and then jack up the price.
It puzzles me sometimes. Why can’t they be just a little greedy? Maybe just double the price. Isn’t that enough? I bet if they just doubled the price, my state Medicaid pharmacy director would not even have noticed. No, go ten, twenty-fold increase.
FTC fined Mylan about $100 million for that one.
In a perverse way, I think Mylan learned their lesson. They only got a few benzo molecules, they didn’t corner the market on ALL benzos. When I was warned by the pharmacy director, I was happy to switch the few benzo prescriptions I write, to cheaper non-Mylan generics.
Mylan came back and played the same game with Epi-pens. This time they cornered the market, and the price went up about five-fold, six-fold.
While I didn’t get the same numbers as you did there still is a great disparity in prices of this one drug when looking at various retail pharmacies.. This is crazy and the public needs to know this type of information. BUT, isn’t this true for most things in the health care arena. Eye glasses for one vary in price greatly, dentists, and physicians also have major differences in what they could charge. Insurance companies pay X and the uninsured pay 10X. It is a mess and it needs to be fixed.