by PharmacyChecker.com | Jul 26, 2013 | Drug Importation, Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies
Do pharmacies outside the U.S. sell many of the same drugs sold at your local pharmacy? Of course. In fact, a good number are manufactured right here in the U.S. and then distributed for sale in other countries. Americans who buy them internationally can get the same drug but, typically, at a much lower cost.
We thought it would be helpful to identify some of these popular prescription brand medications that Americans personally import online for their own use that are manufactured in the good ol’ USA. We’ll be posting about one such drug each week.
Let’s start with Crestor (40 mg), a cholesterol-lowering drug manufactured by AstraZeneca. The packaging of this product shows that it was manufactured in the United States. The price of Crestor at a local New York City pharmacy for a 3-month supply is $679.99; at one of the international online pharmacies verified by PharmacyChecker.com the price is $140.04 – that’s a 79% savings! Alternatively, if you want to buy locally, you can get it with a free discount card for $538.43. There is no low-cost generic equivalent to Crestor available in the U.S.
Although Federal law technically prohibits Americans from purchasing this American-made drug internationally, no one, according to the FDA, has ever been prosecuted for doing so.
Keep checking our blog to learn about other American-made medications sold by international online pharmacies that require your valid prescription, and the incredible savings they offer. To find all U.S.-manufactured drug products researched for this series click here.
Tagged with: American Made Prescriptions Are Cheaper Abroad, AstraZeneca, Crestor
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | Jul 17, 2013 | Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies, Prescription Drug Reports
Symbicort is one of the most popular medications used for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). COPD affect over 13 million adults in the U.S., and is responsible for over 100,000 deaths annually. Unfortunately, Symbicort is expensive in the U.S. It’s just under $1,000 for a three –month supply at a local pharmacy in New York, and no low-cost generic is available. Though the manufacturer offers 1 free inhaler for a patient’s first prescription, the annual cost of Symbicort would still be around $3,500.
You can reduce your Symbicort costs by as much as 85% by ordering through a verified online international pharmacy, bringing your annual cost down to as little as $552. View our savings comparisons below.
For a list of PharmacyChecker.com approved pharmacies, click here, or view Symbicort prices here.
Prices and Savings on Symbicort 160 mcg/4.5 mcg (3 inhalers, 120 doses per inhaler):
| Program |
Price |
Savings Compared to Local Price |
| U.S. Local Pharmacy |
$950.99 |
— |
| Discount Card Price at U.S. Pharmacy |
$765.68 |
19% |
| International Online Pharmacy* |
$138.00 |
85% |
Prices as of 7/17/2013. Local pharmacy in New York City. Discount card price from RxCut.com. International Online Pharmacy price is lowest listed of PharmacyChecker.com listed pharmacies.
*Drug is the same as sold in U.S. but may be sold under a different brand name
Tagged with: COPD, Symbicort
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | Jun 11, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Prices, Medication non-adherence
The latest edition of NPR’s ongoing series, The View From Black America, focuses on Americans who live within fear of financial disaster due to high drug costs. In fact, one in four African-Americans struggle to afford medication, according to a national poll conducted by NPR, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health.
Mike Jackson is one of the millions of Americans whose response to high drug prices was to scale back his medication (in his case, insulin). Mr. Jackson stated, “Instead of taking 60 units twice a day, I was taking 30 units twice a day….The idea behind that was if I watched what I would eat and then stay with the 30 units — I would keep my blood sugar down enough that hopefully it would not be much of a problem.” His medication cost almost $500 per month.
Mr. Jackson ended up with numbness in his foot and toes, and nerve damage in his eyes, sure signs that his diabetes had gone out of control. A trip to the ophthalmologist only added to his medical bills.
Ashley Liggins had to choose whether to purchase food, gas, or medication to control her blood pressure. When the choice comes between medicine and other essentials, like food for your family, sometimes expensive medicine may be the first to go. And this this was the decision made by Ms. Liggins, leading her to reduce doses and borrow pills from her mother.
We will continue to document cases of Americans getting sicker due to high drug prices. To take action on bringing down drug prices consider joining RxRights.org.
To listen to the NPR segment, click here.
Tagged with: diabetes, NPR, RxRights
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | May 30, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies
More public interest and consumer groups are hopping on the bandwagon to defend online access to safe and affordable medication. As we reported a few weeks back, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) has applied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to administer a generic top level domain called “.Pharmacy” (dot pharmacy). NABP proposes to block all online pharmacies that fill orders internationally to Americans from obtaining a website that ends in .Pharmacy, including ones that are safe and approved by PharmacyChecker.com. NABP’s critics, identified below, view its application as an effort to curtail consumer purchases of lower cost medicine from outside the United States. One of their main concerns is that NABP’s application is funded by Merck and Eli Lilly – big pharma: a situation prone to major conflicts of interest.
To read more about this issue see our press release.
This NABP/ICANN issue can be very confusing so I offer the following explanation. ICANN is a non-profit organization that governs the world wide web system of domain names, such as .com, .org., and .edu. For a long time the available suffixes, called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that could be used for website names have been limited. Last year ICANN opened up a process by which companies and organizations could apply to act as registry – administrators – for new names, such as .career, .casino, .charity, etc. In theory, this could open up new opportunities for innovation and development over the Internet. However, a pharma-funded initiative to make the rules and govern the Internet in an area as critical as the distribution of prescription medication will serve only to protect business interests to the detriment of consumers.
David Moon from Demand Progress, an Internet freedom group and lead organization in battling the Stop Online Piracy Act, sums it up perfectly: “From our direct experience with NABP and its allies in Internet policy disputes, there is ample cause to believe the applicant seeks to control .pharmacy to the detriment of free speech & access to safe and affordable medication for consumers.”
Here is a list of the groups and people who have voiced opposition and concern about NABP’s application for .Pharmacy:
Canadian International Pharmacy Association (Tim Smith, President)
Demand Progress (David Moon, Program Director)
Knowledge Ecology International – KEI (James Love, Director)
Mature Voices Minnesota (Robert E. Hines, Board Chair)
PharmacyChecker.com (Tod Cooperman, MD, President and Gabriel Levitt, Vice President)
Public Citizen (Peter Maybarduk, JD, Global Access to Medicines Program Director)
Ram Kamath, PharmD (PharmacyChecker.com, Director of Pharmacy Policy and International Verifications).
RxRights.org (Lee Graczyk, Lead Organizer)
TodaysSeniorsNetwork.com (Daniel Hines)
Tagged with: Demand Progress, ICANN, NABP, pharmacy, RxRights
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | May 24, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Prices, Pharmaceutical Industry
A group of over 100 doctors recently banded together to declare that “lower drug prices [are] a necessity to save the lives of patients who cannot afford them,” as written in their article in Blood, the medical journal published by the American Society of Hematology. We couldn’t agree with them more.
The doctors, experts in chronic myeloid leukemia, focused particularly on the drug Gleevec (imatinib), which costs around $100,000 annually per patient in the United States. Gleevec costs around $35,000 internationally.
There is nothing politically or economically radical about their position. In fact, they acknowledge the societal and political pressures that affect drug pricing, as well as the necessity of profits by drug companies to fund future research. They simply seek fair pricing.
Unfortunately, cancer medication prices are dramatically increasing and are not “fair.” To quote the Blood article: “imatinib may have set the pace for the rising cost of cancer drugs. Initially priced at nearly $30,000 per year when it was released in 2001, its price has now increased to $92,000 in 2012 (1), despite the fact that all research costs were accounted for in the original proposed price….”
Such protests can work; last year doctors at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital pressured Sanofi into effectively halving Zaltrap’s initial market price of $11,000 by offering discounts. We hope that these precedents mobilize more doctors to hop on the bandwagon to further publicize that high drug prices in the U.S. are a serious threat to the public health.
Tagged with: cancer, Gleevec, Sanofi
by Gabriel Levitt, Vice President, PharmacyChecker.com and Sam Werbalowsky, Pharmacychecker.com | May 17, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Prices
A new report from Reuters suggests that pricing pressures resulting from Obamacare may close U.S. and international prescription drug price disparities – with U.S. prices more than double those of other high-income countries – within three to five years. As good as that could be, it’s a long way away for Americans who currently struggle with drug prices. With tens of millions going without meds due to cost, the problem is more urgent than ever.
U.S. brand-name drug prices continue their vigorous rise, in stark contrast to international price declines. Brand-name U.S. drug prices rose 11% in 2011, almost triple the 3% inflation rate. Meanwhile, prices in Canada stayed the same, and actually dropped in France and Switzerland by 3 and 4 percent, respectively.
Reuters politely explains this gap:
“Companies like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca have grown dependent on higher U.S. prices to generate profits as generic rivals to their best-selling medicines enter the world market, Europe’s government-run health plans clamp down on spending and sales growth in emerging markets stutters.”
Perhaps these price increases explain the 50 million Americans between the ages 19-64 and the 20% of Medicare enrollees who do not fill a prescription due to cost each year.
Look at the price of Januvia, a drug mentioned in the Reuters article. Its wholesale price is 75% higher in the U.S. than in Austria. Our own research shows the price gap at the retail level. The price at a local pharmacy for 90 pills is $978. It costs only $375 online from a verified Canadian pharmacy. That’s 62% cheaper.
Hopefully, the Affordable Care Act will lead to reduced drug prices domestically, but that will take some time. Until then international online pharmacies will remain a lifeline for Americans.
Tagged with: AstraZeneca, Januvia, Obamacare, Pfizer
Do pharmacies outside the U.S. sell many of the same drugs sold at your local pharmacy? Of course. In fact, a good number are manufactured right here in the U.S. and then distributed for sale in other countries. Americans who buy them internationally can get the same drug but, typically, at a much lower cost.
