Anyone who lacks health-care insurance or is in the lower income brackets is well aware of the high cost of medical care and drug prices today. Many of these people are forced to go without life-saving treatment and to suffer unnecessarily. Even seniors who receive Medicaid may find themselves unable to afford their prescription co-payments. Sadly, studies show that elderly sufferers of high-blood pressure are one of the largest groups who go without treatment because of the high expense for life-saving medicine.
In addition, untreated mentally ill patients or those who suffer from chronic or acute illness may wind up in emergency rooms, hospitals and needing ambulances, which cost everyone more in the end. Moreover, untreated injuries usually get worse, which cause employed individuals to miss time from work. High drug prices create a vicious circle, and they continue to rise.
Risky Methods Used By Uninsured And Low-Income Patients Due To High Drug Costs
- They do not visit a doctor, or do not fill their prescriptions
- Take their medicine in lower amounts or less frequently than prescribed
- Ask their health practitioner for a lower-priced medication
- Buy their medications from other countries
- Try alternate therapies
What Can Be Done To Combat High Drug Prices Today?
One of the most economical and efficient ways to obtain much-needed medication is to shop and compare drug prices from verified online pharmacies, which are quickly gaining popularity and support from thankful customers. International companies, such as those in Canada, can sell high-quality medications to anyone by mail as long as the customer provides a doctor’s prescription. Some over-the-counter ointments and mild pain relievers are available at a large discount as well. Most of these drugs come in cost-saving generics, but even the name-brand drugs are 40 to 80 percent less than retail prices in the United States.
How Can I Decide Which Online Pharmacy Or Drug Store To Choose?
One helpful website that everyone should bookmark on his or her computer is eDrugSearch.com. This interactive web tool lets you compare drug prices among different pharmacies, which have been proven to provide safe, reliable and affordable medicine. After you shop for the prescribed drug you need, just choose the company with the best prices for your situation. Next, fill out the brief health screen on eDrugSearch and follow the easy directions for sending in your doctor’s prescription.
What Are Some Other Benefits From Buying Medications Online?
- People who live in remote areas or have a hard time getting out to go pick up their medications can have their orders shipped to their mailbox.
- Sending prescriptions over the Internet from a doctor to an online pharmacy reduces the use of paper and cuts down on transcription errors.
- You have more privacy because you order from home instead of having to wait at a pharmacy in person.
Why Should I Use eDrugSearch.com To Find An Online Pharmacy?
- At eDrugSearch, customers are encouraged to leave online reviews about individual pharmacies and also about the medications they use. Get independent information about issues that consumers want to know.
- eDrugSearch also provides a forum on their website that is devoted to input from other users of their site.
- Signing up with eDrugSearch is free and allows the consumer the use of extra features like Rx Alerts.
- Consumers get information about the most commonly prescribed drugs available today.
- At eDrugSearch, you will not find ads or annoying sales pitches because they do not take paid advertisements.
No one should go without their prescribed medications because of astronomical drug prices that they cannot afford. Everyone deserves to have good health and the relief that is available from affordable medicine. Additionally, tell someone you care about to visit the eDrugSearch.com website for the low prices available to them as well.
About this Angie’s List Expert: Cary Byrd is the president and founder of eDrugSearch.com. Based in San Antonio, eDrugSearch.com is a free cost comparison engine that helps consumers get safe access to affordable medications and advocates licensed online pharmacies as a widely accepted alternative.
According to reports, the axe is coming down all over the pharma world on research and development projects that are not yielding immediate results.
AstraZeneca (Atacand, Crestor), GlaxoSmithKline (Advair, Boniva) and Pfizer (Benadryl, Lipitor) have all already begun to scrap projects, while others like Sanofi-Aventis (Allegra, Plavix) are about to pick up the trend and start making cuts.
The cuts come as no surprise, as big pharma companies have been seeing there pipelines shrink since 1998, when the trend to buy out drug rights from smaller bio-tech companies began.
Despite the increased cost efficiency of buying drugs from smaller bio-techs, I am not so sure that big pharma is going to like the end result of their decision.
Stephen Foley raises some excellent questions in a recent post, saying
those calculations about the benefits of in-licensing over in-house could change rapidly if the competition for licensing deals, which has been getting more ferocious for several years, increases dramatically. It could be that they will regret swinging cuts to their R&D budgets sooner rather than later.
And there is another reason for executives to pause. There are very great political benefits from drug companies being able to trumpet the life-changing discoveries that have emerged from their research labs and their scientific trials. Yes, these are companies that have manipulated the publication of scientific data, made over-reaching claims for their drugs, and practiced price gouging of government health and insurance services, but they are also companies that lower our cholesterol, shrink tumors, keep diabetes in check and lift the burdens of depression. In the UK, there is an explicit compact with the government on this score: drug prices charged to the National Health Service are set to allow for investment in research. In the US, the good works of drug research help keep in check the demands for re-importation of drugs from lower-priced Canada, and other cost-cutting measures.
It sounds like big pharma is trying to have their cake and eat it too; outsourcing research and development to cut costs while still maintaining control over patents on drugs to protect their profits.
Cutting the cost of research and development is like cutting off your leg to lose weight. Why not cut the fat of advertisement out first. After all, aren’t doctors suppose to tell us the medicines we need?
After they get rid of the cost of research and development, what excuse will big pharma have left to overcharge consumers?
Boy, Big Pharma is good.
They repeat the same story again and again and pretty soon the media is repeating it again and again, too. Forget digging, researching, checking for yourself — none of the conventional techniques of journalism seem to be powerful enough to withstand Big Pharma’s daily drip-drip-drip propaganda stream.
Of course, it doesn’t help that Big Pharma’s bought-and-paid-for Washington politicians have been taught to spout the same fictions as well.
On the issue of the safety of buying drugs from Canadian pharmacies, the clear and indisputable facts are (1) Canada’s drug approval standards are as good, if not better, than those of the United States, and (2) no American has ever been harmed by ordering drugs online from a licensed Canadian pharmacy.
And yet, Big Pharma lies and lies and lies until actual journalists buy into their nonsense.
The same is true on the issue of high drug prices. Facts are facts, and the fact is that Americans pay a premium of about 67 percent for prescription drugs compared to residents of the rest of the world, according to PharmaTimes. There is no country in the world where residents pay as much for drugs as we are forced to pay in the United States.
Now, common sense would lead you to believe that we’re being ripped off — wouldn’t it?
Amazingly, however, the drip-drip-drip of Big Pharma disinformation has been just as effective with the price issue as with the safety issue.
Since Big Pharma knows that Americans love our freedom, and cherish (at least until recently) our free market economy, they blame the rest of the world — those socialists in Europe and elsewhere — for America’s high drug prices. They say that the rest of the world imposes price controls on drugs, which forces poor Big Pharma to charge Americans more in order to fund research and development on new medications.
And drip-drip-drip, it gets reported as fact by one news organization after another.
Oh, brother. Do you really think Big Pharma would sell drugs to the rest of the world if they weren’t making a lot of money doing it? Of course they wouldn’t. They’re doing just fine.
They’re just not making the obscene profits that they make in the United States.
Now then: do you really think Big Pharma is making obscene profits because America has a free market system? Well, if you took economics in school, one of the first things you’d learn is that an unobstructed free market tends to push down prices over time. So if this were really a free market economy when it came to drug prices, wouldn’t you assume that competition would emerge and ultimately drug prices would come down to a level that people could afford?
Well, yes, they would come down — if drug prices were actually determined by the market. But they’re not.
In truth, our government is very involved in setting the drug prices you pay. They are involved because of a patent system that allows drug companies to have monopolies on the drugs they produce — and that allows these companies to extend their monopolies virtually indefinitely by gaming the system. This gives Big Pharma all the power in establishing prices — and the consumer none.
It’s a wink-wink nod-nod system, with an FDA that has been completely defanged by “pro-market” politicians and completely corrupted by Big Pharma’s money.
Guess what? Monopolies aren’t “pro-market,” they’re anti-market.
Not only that, monopolies are un-American.
America is about competition. Let the drug companies compete — not only with Canada but with each other — and our skyrocketing drug prices will come down to earth, and fast.
Call it wishful thinking — but check out this data from IMS Health, which shows that the use of prescription drugs is on pace to decline in the United States in 2008 after a decade of growth:
The New York Times blames the trend on high drug prices combined with a bad economy. It reports that the implications are not good –
If enough people try to save money by forgoing drugs, controllable conditions could escalate into major medical problems. That could eventually raise the nation’s total health care bill and lower the nation’s standard of living.
Martin Schwarzenberger, a 56-year-old accounting manager for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Kansas City, is stretching out his prescriptions. Mr. Schwarzenberger, who has Type 1 diabetes, is not cutting his insulin, but has started scrimping on a variety of other medications he takes, including Lipitor.
“Don’t tell my wife, but if I have 30 days’ worth of pills, I’ll usually stretch those out to 35 or 40 days,” he said. “You’re trying to keep a house over your head and use your money to pay all your bills.”
I know enough about cholesterol-reducing drugs to know that you have to take them every day. You lose some of the benefit if you don’t — and who knows, maybe that’s the difference in whether this man has an early heart attack or not. God forbid.
But there is something hopeful in this story. After a decade of spending billions of dollars on advertising to encourage drug sales, the pharmaceutical companies are not selling more drugs — but fewer.
From what I remember from my economics classes, if you reach the point where advertising dollars aren’t increasing demand for your product, you have to try something else. And from a pure supply-and-demand standpoint, the easiest thing to try is to lower your prices. Lower them enough, and the number of prescription drugs filled will start going up again.
That’s just common sense, isn’t it?
Of course, when it comes to fixing the pharmaceutical industry, common sense is the ultimate form of wishful thinking.
I don’t believe any nation — even one as great as the United States — should ever rest on its laurels. For this reason, I shout from the rooftops about the changes that I believe we need to make as a country, particularly when it comes improving our healthcare system. I believe that is the duty of every citizen.
If you read this blog regularly, you know my story. I am suspicious of the motives and actions of large pharmaceutical companies. I am concerned that our government is not doing enough to protect us from corporate influence that leads to unsafe drugs being OKed by the government, skyrocketing prices for brand-name medications, and a lack of competition among drug companies both domestically and internationally. I believe these are critical problems that must be addressed.
But as I sit here in my office looking out on a beautiful Texas afternoon, I’m reminded that it’s so important to remember our blessings as a society. I’m reminded, specifically, how important it is to acknowledge the advancements of science and medicine — including, yes, those of pharmaceutical companies — that have made life easier (and longer) than it was for previous generations.
In fact, if you factor in all the risks we’ve faced over the years, American families probably live in the safest period in our history.
Violent crime is low — much lower than it was in the ’70s, for example. Infant mortality is low, people are living longer, and though we certainly need to fix our healthcare system to build upon these gains, it’s important to acknowledge them.
As an advice column I read in the Washington Post today tells a grandmother frustrated with her daughter-in-law’s constant worrying:
You seldom see any small, new headstones in the cemetery anymore, because most children are healthy enough to grow up and grow old. However, if you told your daughter-in-law that antibiotics and vaccines had doubled life expectancy in the past 100 years, she would still be anxious.
Being anxious doesn’t help anybody. Be grateful. And be determined to seek the changes that will ensure continued progress.
Comedienne Tracey Ullman debuted a new series on Showtime this season, and one of her funniest bits was making fun of FDA policy that — officially, at least — forbids American consumers from purchasing drugs from Canadian pharmacies. Check it out:
It’s funny stuff. Of course, the reality, for those familiar with the law, is that the FDA permits U.S. citizens to order drugs in supplies of 90 days or less without fear of confiscation. It’s similar to the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay soldiers.
Though it wouldn’t happen in real life, Ullman’s skit does point out the true absurdity of the FDA’s official stance on Canadian drug reimportation. Fortunately, both John McCain and Barack Obama oppose the FDA’s backward thinking and have announced plans to change the policy to encourage consumers to buy drugs from Canada and force a little price competition — which as we all know, is long overdue.
Jo Hartley reports:
“Health insurance companies are currently revising their pricing systems for very expensive drugs and they are now requiring patients to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for prescriptions for drugs that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases.
“With the new pricing system, insurers have now abandoned the traditional arrangement in which patients pay a fixed amount for a prescription regardless of what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, now they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs. This percentage is usually 20 to 33 percent and obviously this can amount to thousands of dollars a month for some patients.”
Hartley continues: “It is not known how many patients are affected, but hundreds of drugs are now being priced this new way. These drugs are used to treat diseases that are fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, hepatitis C and some kinds of cancer. Unfortunately, there are no generic equivalents for these drugs, so patients are being forced to pay these prices or go without.”
This is not a new phenomenon, but anecdotal reports suggest it is increasingly rapidly — both in the number of insurers who employ this cost-splitting approach and in the number of high-priced drugs included in such plans.
I have a friend on a oral chemotherapy drug who, despite being fully insured through her employer, was still forced to pay thousands of dollars for her medication. Needless to say, this came as a shock to her. It’s hard enough to go through chemo without having to pay thousands of dollars for a few bottles of pills.
Insurers keep moving the goalposts on the definition of “being covered” in this country. Standards of coverage pale in comparison to what they were 20 or even 10 years ago. And yet the premiums continue to increase far more rapidly than the inflation rate.
If you’re forced into a situation where you must pay a high percentage of your drug costs rather than flat prescription drug co-pays, we encourage you to consider shopping at eDrugSearch.com as an alternative. And please feel free to leave your comments below — we love letting people vent!
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Medi-Share: Christian Health Insurance Alternative
