by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Oct 2, 2015 | Drug Prices
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.
Tagged with: cooperman, deraprim, Huffington Post, turing, walgreens
by Tod Cooperman, M.D., CEO, PharmacyChecker.com | Apr 14, 2015 | Drug Importation, Online Pharmacies, Online Pharmacy Verification Services
John Horton, the founder of LegitScript, a company which seems bent on preventing Americans from ordering affordable medication from outside the U.S., recently attempted to discredit PharmacyChecker.com with a false and misleading blog post. This is an old tactic of Mr. Horton. Why does he do this? At least two reasons come to mind: PharmacyChecker.com publishes information that helps Americans find safe and affordable medication from licensed foreign pharmacies and we have publicly exposed Horton’s seemingly unethical business practices.
LegitScript is allied with large pharmaceutical companies and U.S. chain pharmacies, entrenched business interests that lose money when Americans buy less expensive prescription medication outside the U.S.
Mr. Horton’s recent blog post discussed charges against Titilayo Akintomide Akinyoyenu, a pharmacist in Washington D.C. From 2005 to 2010, Mr. Akinyoyenu is alleged to have filled orders from his pharmacy for controlled medications pursuant to prescriptions written by a licensed doctor that were invalid because they were based on online questionnaires rather than a face-to-face examination. His pharmacy was licensed in the District of Columbia and is registered with the Drug Enforcement Agency to sell controlled medicines. He operated an online pharmacy, apexonlinepharmacy.com,which was associated with his licensed pharmacy. PharmacyChecker.com verified the licenses and DEA registration of Mr. Akinyoyenu’s pharmacy, and checked that the online pharmacy required a valid prescription and met other good online pharmacy practice standards, permitting his online pharmacy to be approved in the PharmacyChecker.com Verification Program until August 31, 2010.
Despite the fact that apexonlinepharmacy.com is not a PharmacyChecker-approved online pharmacy and has not been for about five years, Mr. Horton saw an angle in the allegations against Mr. Akinyoyenu to take a shot at PharmacyChecker and give his blog post the false and misleading title “Another PharmacyChecker Approved Internet Pharmacy Gets Indicted.” The indictment is not of the pharmacy, but of Mr. Akenyoyenu himself and it makes no mention of PharmacyChecker. (more…)
Tagged with: apexonlinepharmacy.com, controlled substances, john horton, LegitScript, PharmacyChecker Verification Program, walgreens
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | May 10, 2013 | Advocacy, Medication non-adherence, Skipping medications
The number of Americans not taking medication due to high drug prices – a public health crisis – has increased dramatically over the past decade. Last year, drug prices deterred 50 million Americans ages 19-64 from filling a prescription, a 28% increase since 2003 and 4% increase since 2010, according to the Commonwealth Fund’s 2012 Biennial Health Insurance Survey. The survey measures gaps in medical care due to cost, such as forgone doctors’ visits, medical tests, specialist care, and prescription medications. The prescription-use data for 2012 was derived from answers to the following question: In the last 12 months, was there any time when you did not fill a prescription for medicine because of the cost? This fifty million – a staggering figure – does not even include seniors or children who also did not fill a prescription due to cost.
Not surprisingly, the problems for the uninsured are much greater, especially for those with chronic conditions. Sixty percent of uninsured Americans with a chronic condition skipped taking medication in 2012 due to cost, compared to 14% of insured Americans. Overall, the figure was 28%; that’s 18 million out of sixty-six million adults with hypertension or high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, emphysema, lung disease, or heart disease who reported skipping medication.
As far as seniors skipping meds goes, a recent Walgreens survey may have some answers. It found that 37% of Medicare enrollees are concerned about their drug costs and 20% delay filling prescriptions or skip doses to manage costs. That’s almost an additional eight million (using U.S. Census data for 2011) Americans not adhering to prescriptions due to high drug prices. Walgreens attributes such dismal numbers to the fact that people are unaware of cost-saving alternatives, such as the fact that co-pays vary among pharmacies and limited knowledge of how Part D prescription plans work.
Other reasons seniors skip medication are because their Part D plans do not cover brand name medications prescribed by their doctors and the “donut hole,” a coverage gap in Medicare drug plans that has fortunately begun to close due to Obamacare .
We’re happy to note that the Commonwealth Fund’s report shows that more insured Americans under Obamacare in the years to come could alleviate medical cost problems for millions of Americans. We’ll explore in a future blog post new data on how Americans are addressing the problem of high drug prices.
Tagged with: Commonwealth Fund, Obamacare, walgreens
