by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | May 6, 2015 | Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies
Sorry to sound macabre, but you could die if you don’t fill and adhere to your healthcare practitioner’s prescription for Xarelto (ravaroxaban). It is an anticoagulant, a medication that lowers the rate of blood clots and thereby lowers the risk of stroke. Especially if you were diagnosed with Atrial Fibrillation, a condition characterized by problems associated with irregular heart rate or rhythm, it’s likely that you were prescribed an anticoagulant, such as Xarelto, Pradaxa, or Warfarin. I’m talking about Xarelto because it’s a relatively new brand name drug, which is not available as a generic, and some people who need it might not be able to afford it. It is not necessarily the best anticoagulant out there for you. Alternative medications are available and in use.
If you don’t have insurance or your insurance does not cover Xarelto, then you could face the out-of-pocket costs, which are about $1,176 for a three-month supply of the 20mg pill. If you can afford that then consider yourself lucky. For those who cannot, you could try a Xarelto patient assistance program. Alternatively, ask your doctor or other healthcare provider, and do your own research about another anti-coagulant, such as Pradaxa and Warfarin, that could work for you.
If you do not qualify for a patient assistance program, and your healthcare provider insists on Xarelto, there are verified international online pharmacies that sell brand name Xarelto at a very low price. In fact, the lowest cost international option runs you $2.08/pill, which is $187.20 for 90 tablets. That’s a savings of 84% or almost $1,000 over three months, $4,000 over the course of a year, versus the cash price at some U.S. pharmacies.
For those interested in where your medications come from: the Xarelto 20mg you buy in the U.S. is manufactured in Puerto Rico, according to the U.S. label. Our research shows that the lowest cost international option for Xarelto was manufactured in Germany by Bayer Pharma AG.
I started this post noting the mortality risks of not taking prescribed medications. I’d like to now return to this public health issue not in order to inflame or dramatize but to remind consumers and health officials about the public crisis of high drug prices. Strokes often cause death. Not taking your prescribed anticoagulant can increase your chance of having a stroke. Thirty-five million Americans don’t fill a prescription each year due to high prices; if Xarelto was one of these medicines, then its high price may have prevented people from obtaining it. Some of those people, unfortunately, may have had strokes and passed away. The point here is to not ignore your healthcare provider’s prescription and advice. Follow-up quickly and fill your prescription. If you can’t afford it, then pursue all available options.
Tagged with: Atrial Fibrillation, Bayer Pharmer AG, Drug Prices, patient assistance program, Pradaxa, Warfarin, Xarelto
by PharmacyChecker.com | Apr 9, 2015 | Advocacy, Drug Prices
Access Our Medicine, a group whose mission is to “raise public awareness and engagement in the global problem of access to medicine” has launched a Thunderclap campaign to amplify its reach. While Access Our Medicine has a global focus, millions of Americans go without medication each year because of high costs; the Thunderclap campaign will help amplify these voices by sending out thousands of messages at once advocating for affordable medicine.
If you believe, as we do at PharmacyChecker.com, that everyone should have access to affordable medicine, THEN SIGN THE PETITION NOW!
Tagged with: Access our Medicine
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | Mar 13, 2015 | Drug Prices, Generic drugs, Pharmaceutical Industry, Specialty Drugs
A new report by Express Scripts has found that medication spending by commercial health plans grew by 13.1% last year, primarily due to the release of high cost Hepatitis C meds. Spending also increased significantly for compounded drugs. In the prior decade, total spending ranged between three and six percent.
Keep in mind that the headline statistic of 13.1% applies to how much was spent on drugs; it actually doesn’t tell us anything about the prices of the drugs. If drug utilization, which refers to the amount of drugs taken, increases while prices stay the same, then there’s more spending. As it turns out, utilization decreased by a marginal 0.1 % and d prices increased by 13.2%, demonstrating that drug costs were the primary cause of increased drug spending. In fact, a vice president at Express Scripts referred to the drug price increases as “unprecedented and unsustainable.”
Specialty drugs, which often require careful handling, administration, or monitoring, saw a dramatic 30.9% increase in spending. As mentioned earlier, spending on hepatitis C treatments was the primary driver in overall spending, skyrocketing by 742.6%. Other notable (though nowhere near even 100%) increases include 20% for oncology drugs, 24% for treatments for inflammatory conditions, and 17% for hemophilia drugs. It’s not uncommon for these medications to cost many thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars per month. Sovaldi, a hep C drug, costs $1,000 per pill. We covered the Sovaldi saga in depth.
The story for traditional medications, such as those commonly used to treat asthma, depression, diabetes, GERD, high cholesterol, and pain is much more mixed. Despite drug prices rising by 6.4% overall, prices dropped for five out of ten therapy classes. Depression medication prices, for example, plummeted by 18%. Interestingly, the report noted compound drugsas a therapy class, even though they treat a variety of conditions. These drugs had an unusually large price increase of 128%! Excluding compound drugs, drug prices for traditional meds were up only 2.3%. (more…)
Tagged with: AbbVie, Express Scripts, Gilead Sciences, Harvoni, Hepatitis C, Sovaldi
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Mar 5, 2015 | Drug Importation, Drug Prices, Generic drugs
At the beginning of this year, we brought you the story of Lu Yong, a Chinese citizen with Leukemia who was facing severe financial hardship due to the $3,783 monthly cost of his cancer medication, Gleevec. Mr. Lu found out he could order Veenat, a generic version of Gleevec, from India for a more affordable $640 a month. Soon thereafter he started helping fellow Leukemia sufferers – a thousand of them – access Veenat, in effect helping save their lives. Mr. Lu was rewarded by being charged with selling counterfeit drugs and credit card fraud!
The problem was that Veenat, an entirely genuine, legally manufactured and effective medication approved in India, is designated as “counterfeit” and unapproved in China. The credit card fraud charge was brought because Mr. Lu used other patients’ credit cards to order their medicine.
So, our earlier blog post on this story was called “Low Cost Counterfeit Drugs Save Lives in China…What?!” Seem like a stretch? Not really. Medication deemed “counterfeit” was in fact saving lives. A Chinese court seemed to agree, determining that Mr. Lu’s action should not be construed as “selling counterfeit drugs” since the medication was genuine. Additionally, because his use of other people’s credit cards was to help them, it was not “criminal behavior.” For more read about it in Chinese Radio International.
Lu Yong is a prescription access hero and we applaud him rancorously. Kudos to the Chinese legal system as well.
Tagged with: China, generic gleevec, Gleevec, lu yong, veenat
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | Feb 6, 2015 | Drug Prices, Generic drugs, Medicare Drug Plans
If you were to take a time machine and go back to 2006 and put a hundred bucks in a savings account with 5% annual interest, you’d have $147.50 in 2014. Not bad. But if your interest rate was tied to the annual price increases of brand name drugs you’d end up with…$202. And if for some crazy reason you just wanted to have the same purchasing power 8 years later, and tied your interest rate to inflation, you’d only end up with $125.
Clearly the increase of drug prices are out of line with the prices for everything else, and while the numbers figured above only take in to account brand name prices, generic prices are rising, too. On average, generics cost 5% more in 2014 than they did in 2013. That’s on average – some generic drug prices increased by 2,500 %!
But there’s good news on the way. Senators Sanders and Klobuchar are fighting for more affordable medication. Some more good news, at least for seniors, was released this past week. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration’s fiscal budget for 2016 calls for the government to negotiate prices for biologic and high-cost drugs for Medicare Part D. While, we’d like to see prices negotiated for all drugs, this can still represent huge savings for the government. Estimates suggest that 9.1% of national health spending could be on specialty drugs. That’s total health spending, not just drug spending.
We’re eager to see if the government will actually able to negotiate prices in 2016 – who knows how the budget will change or if Pharma will push to prevent negotiations. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and will certainly let you know.
Tagged with: Medicare Part D, Senator amy Klobuchar, Senator Bernie Sanders, Specialty Medications
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jan 30, 2015 | Drug Prices, Healthcare Reform, Medication non-adherence, Skipping medications
This will not be major headline news anytime soon but it’s true. Last week our friends at RxRights blogged about new data from the Commonwealth Fund showing that the number of Americans ages 19-64 who did not fill prescriptions due to cost decreased to a depressing 35 million in 2014 from the even more depressing figure of 50 million in 2012. Obamacare, lower unemployment, and a stronger economy in which people feel more secure paying for even very expensive medications are largely responsible. Minus the very expensive medications – that’s all good stuff.
And how about international online pharmacies and personal drug importation? Well, just yesterday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that about 2% of Americans are still buying medication from foreign countries. That’s about 5 million Americans who would potentially go without needed medication if it were not for lower cost foreign medication sold by safe international online pharmacies.
I did not use the word “potentially” loosely. Some of those five million are getting nabbed by rogue online pharmacies, resulting in too many Americans taking substandard, adulterated, or counterfeit medications. If those people are informed properly they will not be victims. PharmacyChecker.com is there for you: if you are one of the 35 million Americans wondering whether you can afford that medication prescribed by your doctor, we’re doing better than ever at empowering you with information that helps you get the medications you need at a price you can afford while steering clear of rogue online pharmacies.
It’s important to remember how dangerous it is to not take the medications you need. One expert at CDC stated: “People who do not take their medication as prescribed have more hospitalizations, emergency room visits and an increased burden of their illness.”
It’s important to note that the CDC report provided lower figures on how many Americans are going without prescribed medications due to cost than the Commonwealth Fund reported: about one in 10. We’re going to look at the data in the coming weeks and provide you some guidance on this discrepancy. But clearly the overall numbers have gotten better in the last two years.
We thrive on these better numbers – more consumers accessing the healthcare they need –but with tens of millions of Americans saying they can’t afford their meds there’s so much more work to be done!
Tagged with: CDC, Commonwealth Fund
