Get it out of insurance plans and watch the prices plummet.
I’m all about diet and medical marijuana products. At 64 the only thing my wife and I take besides aspirin is Claritin for her allergies.
they continue to advocate that they reduce expenses for patients, data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows out-of-pocket costs for patients increased 169% from 1987 to 2014.
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That sounds like a savings to me ,, most things have gone up at least that much in that timeframe.
Another concern is the alarming amount of consolidation in the market.
A $2,500 tube of cold-sore cream?
I last bought some in Australia where it's available OTC for less than $10. (£4.85 on the UK from Amazon -- no they won't deliver it to the US)
I was running low -- that's how I found out about the silly pricing.
They wake up each day, shower, have their coffee, and go to work. There they devise ways of gaming the system through complex Kafkaesque rules whose purpose is to cheat the patient, a patient with no other recourse or court of appeal.
The word shameful doesn't even begin to describe this behavior.
Being a pharmacist this guy actually seems to have some insight into what the structural problems are.
They all lead back to Big Pharma + K Street.
“pharmacists are many times contractually prohibited by Pharmacy Benefit Managers from telling their patients when it would be cheaper to pay with cash instead of insurance.”
That’s why I use 2 pharmacies: one has my insurance, the other thinks I am uninsured. Many times, the cash price is less than your out of pocket.