Posted on 09/25/2015 3:20:34 AM PDT by IBD editorial writer
It’s all crazy. I had the opposite experience. One of my son’s meds was usually under $20. I forgot to bring the new insurance card to the pharmacy and since we pay for all our meds anyway decided to skip running it through insurance first. It quadrupled the cost. Went home to get the card!
As I understand it, our insurance wasn’t paying anything towards the cost, but it set the price the pharmacy could charge. The price varies from day to day and company to company.
We have a lot of the cream on hand as our dermatologist, bless her heart, gave our son several prescriptions when we hit our deductible two years ago. It took having a baby and our son in the hospital for skin issues to meet it! Sixty seemed like a lot for a jar of lotion...$200 will send me looking for a non prescription alternative.
Yeah? Try going to Europe"
The situation with foreign country sales can be quite different. In order to remain viable, US drug companies must be prudent with US sale price in order to recover the $2.5 billion cost of approvals to sell in the US. Keep in mind, the production cost of most drugs is near zero in comparison. When they can also sell the drugs in other countries with controlled prices, it is also prudent to sell them there at the controlled price. It's counterproductive to allow reimporting these at the controlled price, when the R&D costs have not been recovered.
I say again, the problem is the cost of FDA approvals, not drug company greed. If you are going to convince me of drug company greed, you're going to have to show me a drug company with excessive profits.
"Excessive profits"... now there's an Orwellian term if I've ever heard one. That's no measure of a company's ethics; a better measure is the company's ethics. Do they spend as much money on lobbying as they do R&D? Do they engage in activity in restraint of trade? Do they, in short, try to 'fix the game' in their favor?
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