A newspaper in Cleburne, Texas, outside Dallas, has published an excellent illustration of a point we’ve been making since we launched eDrugSearch.com: it’s well worth the effort to comparison shop for prescription drugs. An excerpt from the article:

Seven local pharmacies were contacted in an effort to discover what an uninsured consumer would pay for four random, common prescription medications. None of the 28 total prices reported by the pharmacies were equal in amount. One of the prescriptions varied in price by more than $39 depending on where it was filled.

The medications inquired about were a 250/50mcg Advair Diskus inhaler, used to treat asthma-related conditions; 0.5mg Alprazolam, the generic form of Xanax, used to reduce anxiety; 50mg Tramadol, the generic form of Ultram, a pain reliever; and 20mg Lexapro, an antidepressant.

The price of one 250/50mcg Advair Diskus inhaler, used to treat asthma-related conditions, at Keene Pharmacy is set at $201.10 while Kroger’s pharmacy sells the same inhaler for $240.79. At Wal-Mart Supercenter’s pharmacy, a 30-day supply of the pain reliever Tramadol is $4 but it sells for $28.50 at Cleburne Drug.

Some of the pharmacies can afford to sell generic forms of brand name medications at a fixed low price, such as Wal-Mart’s $4 prescription program. .. Kroger has a similar $4 program for generics. Although the cost of an Advair Diskus at Kroger was high compared with other pharmacy prices, Kroger sells Tramadol for $24.50, less than the identical dose and form sold at Cleburne Drug…

Walgreens and CVS, both well-known pharmacies across the U.S., were two of the more expensive pharmacies for the uninsured of the seven local pharmacies contacted. Both … offer saving cards for the uninsured. An uninsured consumer would pay more than $17 less for a 30 day supply of Lexapro, which has no generic form, and $29 less for the Advair Diskus, which also has no generic, with a Walgreens saving card…

If you click the links in the excerpt above, you’ll see a comparison of prices for these medications at eDrugSearch.com member pharmacies. You’ll find that:

• The 250/50mcg Advair Diskus inhaler is available for less than $70 at several pharmacies;
• 50mg Tramadol is available for about half of Wal-Mart’s price, if bought in quantity;
• 20mg Lexapro is available for between $1.50 and $2 per tablet, also significantly less than Wal-Mart and other U.S. retailers;
• The fourth drug, a controlled substance, is not sold through eDrugSearch.com member pharmacies.

In other words, if you can find the drug at eDrugSearch.com, you can probably buy it for a lot less than anywhere in Cleburne, Texas — or at any brick-and-mortar drugstore in the U.S., for that matter.

So please, comparison shop — but don’t forget to include licensed online pharmacies in your search.

One of the biggest advantages of shopping for prescription drugs online is price transparency, which empowers the consumer to easily find the best price among available options.

As healthcare consumers well know, it is very difficult to comparison shop among brick-and-mortar pharmacies, because pharmacies typically don’t advertise their prices for prescription drugs (with the exception of the Wal-Mart generic drug program and similar programs, which generally include a list of covered drugs on the retailer’s Web site.)

Because it’s difficult to compare prices, particularly for expensive, brand-name drugs, most consumers buy at their corner drugstore, assuming the price isn’t much different from the next corner — or the other side of town. This simply isn’t the case. What’s worse, the disparities in pricing disproportionately affect poorer people.

According to a new study appearing in the Health Services Research journal:

Four of the most widely prescribed drugs in the United States can cost 15 percent more on average in the poorest neighborhoods of Florida, according to a study comparing retail pharmacy prices around the state. Part of the explanation is the high proportion of independent pharmacies in poor ZIP codes that charge the highest prices for Nexium, Advair, Plavix and azithromycin…

In contrast, the study shows that chain pharmacies are less expensive and less likely to vary their prices based on ZIP code. However, they are also less common in poorer areas. The authors noted that some independent pharmacies in poor neighborhoods did charge prices similar to chain pharmacies, but that issues such as health literacy, finances and transportation could limit consumers from shopping around…

Even small price increases have negative consequences, and two earlier studies found that the cost of prescription drugs discourages uninsured and poor people from filling their prescriptions. As a result of not controlling their health, they spend more time in emergency rooms.

The researcher behind the study concludes:

“Insuring the uninsured is a priority. However, uninsured people who pay retail prices for their medications and struggle with health care costs should not face higher prices because of where they live. Even though these variations are based on data from only one state, they deserve further investigation.”

That’s a huge variation in pricing. It reflects the fact that U.S.consumers are not accustomed to comparison shopping for prescription drugs — and drugstores certainly don’t make it easy to do so. Believe me, if consumers routinely shopped around when buying drugs, you’d see a leveling of pricing across the board.

Until that day comes, Marks advises consumers to comparison shop by checking prices on the Web, and says that prices online are almost always cheaper than at brick-and-mortar pharmacies. Consumer Reports editor Steven Findlay also recommends purchasing drugs from Canadian pharmacies.

Read the report and watch the TV interview with Marks here.

Two big reasons for the increase: we’ve added more pharmacies, and we’ve updated our backend to make it much easier for member pharmacies to include their full inventories in our database.

Read more about this achievement in our press release.

It’s not worth saving a few dollars (or even a lot of dollars) to risk being ripped off or, worse, being sold a bad product. The stakes are higher with prescription drugs than most other products purchased online, obviously. We’re talking about your health and safety, not just losing your money.

That’s why our comparison shopping engine only includes pharmacies that follow our 11 Commandments. When you shop at eDrugSearch.com, you know you’re not only getting good bargains — you’re also getting them from safe, licensed and accredited Canadian, domestic and international pharmacies.

I bring all this up because I ran across a Consumerist post called “How to Research an Unknown Online Retailer,” which reminded me that it can still be a jungle out there when buying products online.

We created eDrugSearch.com so you could escape the jungle and find a safe place to search, save — and now, share in our online community as well.

I’ve been in love with the potential of online services to turbocharge comparison shopping by combing through all the options to find the very best deals. This is a mindset, I’ve discovered, that I share with many engineers and technically minded business people who also see shopping as a great optimization equation. …

For all of them, there has been a sadly predictable transition as idealism morphs into the cruel realities of running a business. The comparison shopping engines, like ComputerESP (bought by CNet’s Shopper.com) and BizRate (now part of ShopZilla), stopped displaying things in the order that most favored consumers with the lowest prices or whatever else the consumer wanted first. Instead, they tried to find ways to favor advertisers, like listing paying customers first or simply ignoring sites that didn’t pay for access.

Hansell wrote that Zillow plans to be different, because it will be supported not by participating lenders, but by advertisers without a conflict of interest. As the writer explains Zillow CEO Rich Barton’s point of view: “The money available from general advertising is making [it] possible to make money from services that don’t have built-in conflicts.”

It will be interesting to see whether Zillow can be successful with this model, but the history is that companies start with this kind of model and then change it when they build up enough business. So we’ll see in Zillow’s case.

eDrugSearch.com, of course, is a comparison shopping engine, too. And my thought in reading this piece is that the issue for consumers is not really one of conflict of interest. To me, that’s more of a journalistic construct than anything else. If you’re the New York Times, you can’t tie your advertising to your editorial content because then people will doubt the integrity of your content. That’s why there is a firewall built between the two sides of the business.

With online shopping engines, it’s less about avoiding conflicts of interest than it is about finding the most efficient way to express the commonality of interests among all players: the shopping engine, sellers and buyers. The market weeds out those who can’t properly balance these three parts of the equation.

Look, we are in a competitive business. If you want to know how competitive, you can just look at our post from Friday. One competing comparison shopping engine falsely accused us of stealing their code. (We responded by pointing out the many features that appeared on their site shortly after they appeared on ours.)

The bigger picture here is that when the competition is this fierce, you’ve got a lot of minds working every day to find a more efficient equation. Will Zillow be a better way of shopping for a mortgage than Lending Tree? Maybe, and maybe not. But you can bet that a lot of smart guys other than Rich Barton are working on this equation every single day.