The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath

[conuly]

http://tinyurl.com/lb43rou

This article is too much of a hassle to copy and paste, so I'm not going to bother. The long and the short of is that Americans pay waaaaay too much for medicines, and Ana's $125 inhalers would only cost about $20 overseas. The rich keep getting richer, don't they?

Comments

[janewilliams20]

"..while pharmacists in Britain buy the identical product for about $20 and dispense it free of charge to asthma patients..."
Not quite true. Asthma isn't one of the conditions for which adults get free prescriptions (though children do, so Ana's inhalers would cost you absolutely nothing here). Dave's inhalers would cost the standard charge for any prescription (currently £7.85) if he bought them singly. In fact we both use a prescription pre-payment certificate, which covers all our prescriptions for £104 a year.

A few years ago, on holiday in Tunisia, he ran out, and bought some there at what amounted to about £1 each.

[conuly]

Thank you.

[dandelion.livejournal.com]

I am amazed that anyone is using the CFC ban as a reason for why inhalers are expensive. First, lots of the inhalers in the articles don't involve CFCs at all (they are dry powder and the patient essentially provides the propellant). Secondly, we dispense shedloads of CFC-free salbutamol (short-acting, reliever inhaler). The official wholesale reimbursement price is $2.25 each but we probably pay less than that...

(I think the main reasons are the ones elsewhere in the article: to cover the cost of direct-to-consumer advertising, and the fact that negotiations and cost-controls on prices are disallowed by law. Medicare should be able to negotiate very low prices due to sheer quantity used.)

[rainbow-goddess.livejournal.com]

I just had a discussion about this very subject with another LJ friend, susandennis, about how expensive our respective inhalers are. I recently changed to a stronger dose of Advair and with the dose being stronger the price went up.