The Daraprim Drama: Prices Keep Going Up in the U.S. AND at Foreign Online Pharmacies
Contrary to the belief of the pharmaceutical industry and their minions, PharmacyChecker.com is not a champion of foreign online pharmacies, even the safest ones. They just charge a lot less for medication, which helps American consumers stay healthy and avoid bankruptcy. But they are, like their U.S. pharmacy counterparts, just businesses.
And that brings us back to our blog topic from last week, which was Daraprim, the parasite-fighting drug that, in the blink of an eye, went from $13.50/pill to $750/pill in the U.S. a few weeks back. We wrote what seemed impossible: a 99.8% international pharmacy savings on a medication. When we published that post, the price of Daraprim, manufactured and marketed by GlaxoSmithKline in Europe, was $1.53 a pill at the lowest cost international online pharmacy in the PharmacyChecker Verification Program. Well, those international online pharmacies jacked their prices, too…kind of.
As PharmacyChecker founder Tod Cooperman, MD, was writing an article for the Huffington Post about Daraprim, prescription drug importation and overall drug affordability problems, we discovered that the online price of Daraprim 25mg jumped from $1.53 a pill to $6 bucks! An increase of 292%.
It was reported that the villain of this whole story, the head of Turing Pharmaceuticals, the company that owns Daraprim in the U.S., was planning on lowering the price of Daraprim, which appeared to be an almost necessary public relations move. I called chain pharmacy giant Walgreens today expecting that the price would be less than $750 but found out that the price was actually $796/pill.
So the potential international drug price savings on Daraprim has plummeted from 99.8% to 99.25% A little Rx irony to end our week here at PharmacyChecker.com.
