Interesting Read on Medications

[The ladies that signed below are Budget Analysts out of federal Washington D.C. offices. ]

Did you ever wonder how much it costs a drug company for the active Ingredient in prescription medications? Some people think it must cost a lot, since many drugs sell for a lot of money by the

tablet. As we
have revealed in past issues of Life Extension, a significant percentage of drugs sold in the United States contain active ingredients made in other countries.

In our independent investigation of how much profit drug companies really make, we obtained the actual price of active ingredients used in some of the most popular drugs sold in America. The chart below speaks for itself.

Celebrex 100 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $130.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.60
Percent markup: 21,712%

Claritin 10 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $215.17
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.71
P! ercent markup: 30,306%

Keflex 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tab lets): $157.39
Cost of general! active ingredients: $1.88
Percent markup: 8,372%

Lipitor 20 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $272.37
Cost of general active ingredients: $5.80
Percent markup: 4,696%

Norvasc 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $188.29
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.14
Percent markup: 134,493%

Paxil 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $220.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $7.60
Percent markup: 2,898%

Prevacid 30 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $44.77
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.01
Percent markup: 34,136%

Prilosec 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $360.97
Cost of general active ingredients $0.52
Percent markup: 69,417%

Prozac 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $247.47
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.11
Percent markup: 224,973%

Tenormin 50 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $104.47
Cost of general active ingredients:! $0.13
Percent markup: 80,362%

Vasotec 10 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $102.37
Cost! of general active ingredients: $0.20
Percent markup: 51,185%

Xanax 1 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) : $136.79
Cost of general active ingredients: $0.024
Percent markup: 569,958%

Zestril 20 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets) $89.89
Cost of general active ingredients $3.20
Percent markup: 2,809%

Zithromax 600 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $1,482.19 Cost of general active ingredients: $18.78 Percent markup: 7,892%

Zocor 40 mg
Consumer price (100 tablets): $350.27
Cost of general active ingredients: $8.63 Percent markup: 4,059%

Zoloft 50 mg
Consumer price: $206.87
Cost of general active ingredients: $1.75 Percent markup: 11,821%

Since the cost of prescription drugs is so outrageous, I thought everyone I knew should know about this.
Please read the following and pass it on. It pays to shop around. This helps to solve the mystery as to why they can afford to put a Walgreens on every corner.

On Monday night, Steve Wilson, an investigative reporter for Channel 7 News in Detroit, did a story on generic drug price gouging by pharmacies. He found in his investigation, that some of these generic drugs were marked up as much as 3,000% or more. Yes, that's not a typo.....three thousand percent!

So often, we blame the drug companies for the high cost of drugs, and usually rightfully so. But in this case, the fault clearly lies with the pharmacies themselves. For example, if you had to buy a prescription drug, and bought the name brand, you might pay $100 for 100 pills. The pharmacist might tell you that if you get the generic equivalent, they would only cost $80, making you think you are "saving"

$20. What the pharmacist is not telling you is that those 100 generic pills may have only cost him $10!

At the end of the report, one of the anchors asked Mr.
Wilson whether
or not there were any pharmacies that did not adhere to this practice, and he said that Costco consistently charged little over their cost for the generic drugs. I went to the Costco site, where you can look up any drug, and get its online price. It says that the in-store prices are

consistent with the online prices. I was appalled.

Just to give you one example from my own experience, I had to use the drug, Compazine, which helps prevent nausea in chemo patients. I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for 60 pills at CVS. I checked the price at Costco, and I could have bought 100 pills for $19.89. ; For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $7257. I could have got 150 at Costco for $28.08. I would like to mention, that although Costco is a "membership" type store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there, as it is a federally regulated substance. You just tell them at the door that you wish to use the pharmacy, and they will let you in (this is true, I went there this past Thursday and asked them).

I am asking each of you to please help me by copying this letter, and pasting it into your own email, and send it to everyone you know with an email address.

Sharon L. Davis
Budget Analyst
U.S. Department of Commerce
Room 6839
Office Ph: 202-482-4458
Office Fax: 202-482-5480
Email Address: sdavis@doc.gov

Mary Palmer
Budget Analyst
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Office of Budget & Finance
Voice: (202) 606-9295
Fax: (202) 606-5324

Thank god I don't need any meds.

I am on the antibiotic Zithromax. Cost for 3 pills. $80.00!

Muse2NOPharaoh said:

DAMN it!

Anxiety said:

...and this is my 2nd round!

Prescription drugs cost too much. But the cost to develop, test, and successfully market a drug is far greater than the cost of its ingredients.
Over the past 5 years, Pfizer has sold a lot of overpriced medication, but look at the company's stock performance over the same period of time:

don't know how true this is, but just to give the drug companies some sort of olive branch, they often spend shit loads of R&D. Generic companies (and i've acted for a few) are often good at perusing masses of patents and finding flaws in the same, and then challenging them. The drug companies then have to either pay off the generic companies to cease action or fight a lengthy battle to maintain their patents. So maybe this is factored in, in some way.

Muse2NOPharaoh said:

If a physician wanted to prescribe me Zithromax, I'd ask if there's a generic medication that would work just as well. I'm not a medical doctor, but my understanding of Zithromax is that the drug's main appeal among antibiotics is convenience: the usual prescription involves taking a dose once per day for five days, and then you're done.

My current health insurance doesn't cover prescriptions. When I had similar insurance in the past, and I needed an antibiotic, I'd tell the treating physician about my lack of prescription coverage. He or she would then do one of the following:

1) Go to the cabinet where they keep samples of name-brand drugs and give me free meds... woo-hoo!

2) Write me a prescription for a time-tested generic drug.

One time I had a doc go really old-school and prescribe me penicillin VK. This involved taking a total of 40 rather large pills: 2 pills twice a day for 10 days. Not nearly as convenient as Zithromax, but hey, it worked perfectly, and as I recall, getting the prescription filled cost me less than $10.

The original post seems to be a combination of two or more emails, with the names of two alleged government employees tacked on at the end. See:

http://www.snopes.com/med...eneric.asp

The part about generic drug prices varying is essentially true, although the "$7257" is missing a decimal point... it should be $72.57.

OTOH, the table of drug price markups has little, if anything, to do with varying prices of generic drugs. Those seem to be prices for name-brand drugs. And a few of the drugs listed are available as generics. For instance, let's take 100 pills of 1 mg Xanax (heh-heh).

walgreens.com lists the generic at $16.99 for 60 tablets or 180 tablets at $45.69. That's pretty much the same unit price, so we can calculate that walgreens.com would probably charge about $28 for 100 tablets.

drugstore.com lists the generic at $7.99 for 30 tablets or $10.97 for 90 tablets. Those are seriously varying unit prices, so I don't know what they'd charge for 100 tablets. But $12 is probably a good estimate.

So yes, prices for generics do vary... my example shows that walgreens.com will probably charge more than twice as much as drugstore.com would for generic Xanax. But neither source is going to charge you $136.79... that appears to be the name-brand price (drugstore.com sells 90 tablets of name-brand 1 mg Xanax for $133.98). Most people aren't going to pay for the name-brand version if a generic is available at 1/10th of the price, and even if your insurance covers prescriptions, most health insurance plans are set up in a way that discourages name-brand meds when a generic is available.

Thanx Matt for all the additional interesting info