Costco and the Cost of Drugs
This post is actually not mine….. It was came to me by way of Anon (forwarded from one of his friends) with the notation that,” It was something I might use on the Blog”…. I replied to him that he should just post it under his own name and proceeded to explain to him how to write a post and enter it without re-typing by “copy” and “paste”….. Here was his reply: “What the hell are you talking about? Dashboards are on cars. Post is at the post office. And I haven’t “pasted” since grade school.”
I think everyone should be interested in and worried about the outrageousness of the content, so I decided, with Anon’s permission to post the following:…..
Let’s hear it for Costco!! (This is just mind-boggling!)…. Make sure you read all the way past the list of the drugs….
The person who provided this information is Sharon L. Davis, Budget Analyst, U.S. Department of Commerce out of the Washington, DC Federal 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 more than $2.00 per tablet. We did a search of offshore chemical synthesizers that supply the active ingredients found in drugs approved by the FDA. As we have revealed 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
Percent markup: 30,306%
Keflex 250 mg
Consumer Price (100 tablets): $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%
Norvasec 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 (1! 00 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 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 Walgreen’s on every corner……
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,i n 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 eq! uivalent, 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 $72.57….. 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)….. Pass this on for all of you lucky enough to have a Costco nearby……
May 4th, 2005 at 10:41 pm
Elements of this message are true, some false, and some irrelevant. In general, everyone should be skeptical of the validity of information in forwarded emails. For more information on this post, see the following links:
http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/generic.asp
http://www.breakthechain.org/exclusives/genericrx.html
May 5th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Would also like to know if and how much of drug research is paid for by fedral government.
May 6th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
If you are really interested in the inter-workings of the drug companies, insurance companies, Doctors, the AMA, and politicians, I’d like to recommend you check out a book called “Ultra-Prevention”…. Although it is basically a “better health though less drugs” type book, the first part of the book examines in detail the American medical system inter-workings along with your own body’s inter-workings…… I bought my copy from Amazon but you can check out http://www.simonsays.com which is the publisher for more info also……
It was written by two doctors, Mark Hyman, M.D., and Mark Liponis, M.D., who have a different science-based approach on medical treatment….
Here’s a little from the dust cover: “Healthcare is pulled and shaped by many forces, by drug and insurance companies looking for profits, by politicians in search of votes, and by stressed, overworked physicians who barely have time to talk to you before writing a prescription or packing you off to a specialist…… So is anyone interested in keeping you well?”……
It’s worth taking a look at…….
May 6th, 2005 at 10:13 pm
While mostly correct, the text still perpetuates a terrible untruth about american medical practiceâthat medicines and the care provided by PharmDs is expensive. It turns out that these services cost little (~10% of the healthcare dollar) and are by far the most cost-effective outlays. It matters not what the acquisition cost of a product is that is approved and dispensed by your pharmacistâunless you are willing for consistency to critique the far greater waste by physicians. The “chat” that a physician puts you through (afetr waiting to get an appointment, waiting in the waiting room and waiting in the exam room) typically costs far more than an entire month’s supply of round-the-clock high-tech therapy that keeps you alive, keeps you out of the hospital and keeps you with your family. What is the ‘acquisition cost’ of a physician ‘delivering’ a baby (the nurses really do it and the ‘delivering’ MD passes the new arrival to the pediatrician so that they too can bill for the moment). Why is this few minutes of time worth ~$2000??? Why do physicians have their residency paid for by tax dollars, yet do not feel the need to repay this welfare to the citizens when they are oversompensated for the rest of their life? Yet they make the specious and hypocritical argument that since much of basic research leading to drug patents is tax-supported that somehow the populace owns the patents? Why is is that people seem to believe that a 4-year PharmD somehow fits INSIDE of a 4-year MD??? Face it, MD’s, as a group, are the least capable professionals in medicine in making well-reasoned drug therapy decisions. Drugs are cheap, PharmDs are cheap (and they make themselves extremely accessibleâin supermarkets, on the weekends. Ask a PhD what s/he thinks about an MD (a bachelors degree, in reality) calling themselves “doctors”.