Actual Cost Of Making These Popular Prescription Drugs

[pdove]

BRAND NAME CONSUMER COST OFINGREDIENTS PERCENTMARKUP?br /> PRICE per tab/cap
100
Celebrex 100 mg $130.27 $0.60 21712%

Claritin 10 mg $215.17 $0.71 30306%

Keflex 250 mg $157.39 $1.88 8372%

Lipitor 20 mg $272.37 $5.80 4696%

Norvasc 10 mg $188.29 $0.14 134493%

Paxil 20 mg $220.27 $7.60 2898%

Prevacid 30 mg $44.77 $1.01 34136%

Prilosec 20 mg $360.97 $0.52 69417%

Prozac 20 mg $247.47 $0.11 224973%

Tenormin 50 mg $104.47 $0.13 80362%

Vasotec 10 mg $102.37 $0.20 51185%

Xanax 1mg $136.79 $0.02 569958%

Zestril 20 mg $89.89 $3.20 2809%

Zithromax 600mg $1,482.19 $18.78 7892%

Zocor 40mg $350.27 $8.63 4059%

Zoloft 50mg $206.87 $1.75 11821%

"I was appalled. Just to give you one example from my own experience, I had to use the drug, Compazine, which helps prevent nausea in chemo patients. I used the generic equivalent, which cost $54.99 for 60pills at CVS. I checked the price at Costco, and I could have bought 100 pills for $19.89. For 145 of my pain pills, I paid $72.57. I could have got 150 at Costco for $28.08.I would like to mention, that although Costco is a "membership" type store, you do NOT have to be a member to buy prescriptions there, as it is a federally-regulated substance. You just tell them at the door that you wish to use the pharmacy, and they will let you in. "

For Detail see http://www.rense.com/general45/acvost.htm
Please let your love ones know.

[Fescue4u]

1. Very misleading.

Now Im not saying that prescriptions are not overpriced, but research and development, marketing and other business expenses have to be factored in.

Its the same story in the software business. It may cost 10 million dollars to write a software packet and said software may sell for $2000.

Yet each disk cost only $1 to produce. Is that a 20000% markup? Yes, but its a distorted view unless you factor in startup cost.

[Ellen Forradalom]

2. My thought exactly

but better stated.

The first one off the line costs a half-billion dollars and all the rest after it cost a nickel each.

This is not to say that Big Pharma aren't greedy bastards, that they don't use mean tricks to extend patents and benefit from federal research far more than they let on. Still, drugs require a huge upfront investment. There's no getting around that.

[Occulus]

4. "Still, drugs require a huge upfront investment."

Don't they already get some tax money and breaks etc. for that? Aren't we really paying twice?

Three times, if you count the wasted space their ads take up. Sheesh. Advertise in a medical journal. Don't advertise to the public- who can't just run out and buy them.

I mean, really. They don't have to spend a dime on marketing. They can and should only publish in respected medical journals.

By advertising their drugs, they're making us think we need them. Take a look at the tone of the ads themselves when you next see them. It's really eye-opening. Often, they won't even tell us what the drug is for.

Doesn't the public own the airwaves themselves? Can't We The People put a stop to this nonsense?

(I'm 28. This didn't happen when I was a child.)

[HuckleB]

9. Yes.

A great deal of drug research comes from tax dollars that are never reimbursed while drug companies haul in huge profits. Further, drug companies now spend more money on advertising than on research and development. Their push to get consumers to ask for specific drugs so they can sell even more drugs and make more money has pushed the costs even higher. I don't use drugs based on advertising, and I don't want to have to pay for drug companies to advertise so they can get even richer.

[KT2000]

3. that is misleading too

to calculate R&D, one must account for the tax dollars collected by the pharmaceutical companies for that purpose. Unfortunately, they refuse to divulge that information. We just do not know the true cost of our mediciations.

[oscar111]

5. TRUE COSTS OF R & D

Shame on those posters above who slavishly just repeated the vague untested excuses devised by the corporations. Haven't they learned by now , to QUESTION ALL? Especially to question corporations?

TVA... tenn valley authority... electric utility ... was built to answer the r and d cost excuse ...given in a parallel case, utilities.

With pills, i submit that we can find out in general.. varing natch with each drug... in general, the r and d cost, by

///getting info from drug companies run by co ops or run by the state... in places like Sweden, Brazil, and you know the rest. Possibly even Canada. Research cost claims by corporations need to drop due to tax subsidies and due to tax paid work done at Universites.

Much basic research is done at colleges, and corporations just step in, reap and profit. Parallel to NASA doing experiments on the space station, then corporations taking results for profit. You pay, they profit. You never realize it. You vote to keep it going. You a chump.

///as to marketing cost, ... here one sputters with laughter. Ought not be ANY ad costs. Ads are just a burden on the public. They distort rational pill usage.

///All healthcare ought to be nationalized... including pill firms. Then the time wasted on debating pill r and d costs, would be saved.
Take the greed out of healthcare.

[Romberry]

6. Marketing dwarfs R&D and is not a legitimate expense

In addition, much of the costs of development are actually borne by taxpayers.

They should absolutely prohibit advertisement of prescription drugs ("Ask your doctor!") to end users. It's a waste. And do not hand me that "free speech" crap. Corporations are not people and are no more entitled to "free speech" than the bricks that my home is made of. Corporations are pieces of paper in a file cabinet with a charter. No more. No less.

There should also be an absolute requirement that "new and improved" drugs be evaluated against established cheaper drugs for efficacy. What exactly is the difference between the two "little purple pills" Prilosec and Nexium? As a matter of efficacy, absolutely none!

For some things the free market does very well. In the case of prescription drugs it is an absolute unmitigated disaster. "Cheap but effective" is a death knell for the availability of a therapeutic pharmacological and that is just a damn shame.

[Lexingtonian]

7. I don't buy these numbers

Really, 2 cents per pill of Xanax (a benzodiazipine drug) may cover the raw ingredients contained but hardly the manufacturing manpower costs and inefficiencies (inherent in the chemical synthesis), inert pill filling, and quality control measurements. The table uses something like the famous misguided logic by which the human body's value as chemicals is estimated at 75 cents to two dollars.

Sadly, if we make medications as cheap as we really could, people would make egregiously wasteful use of them in no time whatsoever. It's like gasoline- the way to minimize waste and "pill culture" effects and massive black market supply is to make the stuff significantly expensive so that people don't get overprescriptions, don't overuse, and don't have enough lying around to abuse. (I mean maybe $20-$50 per bottle for occasional users, certainly less for medications of the elderly. Perhaps more for drugs prone to recreational abuse.)

I did work in biotech for a time, and people there didn't consider biotech companies or the pharmaceutical companies distinguishable from the Medellin cartel but for the nominal legality of the products involved. Snake oils attract the type of salesmen and the sucker customers today as in centuries past. A few drugs on the market today will still be there in 50 years- aspirin, acetaminophen, captopril. Over 90% will not. Celebrex is the obvious one on the list; it turns out to be superior to acetaminophen (Tylenol) (which acts at the same molecules) only in rare instances and will likely be abandoned as soon as its patent expires.

But as long as the present shell and cost-shifting and patent and trade secret and rich customer hopefulness games keep up, it's a great merry-go-round of new pills and labels and Republican-voting pharmaceutical industry employees mostly in Connecticut and New Jersey, keeping taxpayer money flowing into stockholder accounts.

As for new drugs and research, I think the 1950s were pretty much when the pharmaceutical industry did its, rather horrid, best. Academic biomedicine, bumbling as it is, is going to drive the creation of the next generation of efficacious new drugs- all the fishing expeditions of the present are very rarely yielding new things, let alone great ones.

[Knoxville_Bob]

8. I work for a PBM -

That's a Pharmacy Benefits Manager - as the name implies, we manage pharmacy benefits for numerous plans - I wouldn't be surprised in the least if some of you didn't carry our card.

I'd be interested in finding out where the reporter got the cost of making the medications.

Someone previously pointed out that the cost of development wasn't included in the costs listed - it also appears that they didn't include the actual cost of manufacturing - maintaining the facility, paying the workers, insuring quality on the line - they gave just the base cost of the medication.

I wonder what the base cost of the raw materials in my car, or my computer is - seems to me that if we base pricing on just the base cost of raw materials, we're all getting ripped off somewhere.

The article also goes on about the consumer price (sometimes called U&C or usual and customary). It doesn't say anything about the average wholesale price (AWP) or contract pricing - it doesn't make a distinction between any of that. I also notice that it doesn't address the prices of the medications when purchased with pharmacy benefits. The highest cost med I've ever processed had a usual and customary price (the price if you didn't have benefits) of $650,000. The contract price (the price set between the PBM and the pharmacy) was around $375,000.

The patient's copay? $30 for a 28 day supply. It was a blood based medication for hemophelia. Did he get ripped off?