Every web site needs one post with a silly clickbait title. But this is good stuff.
I take a med called a statin. I take the generic version, and I’m lucky that my health insurance plan covers the cost. But once the local CVS refilled it, and when I went to pick it up they told me the insurance didn’t cover it and I would have to pay $67 for 90 pills. That’s $0.75 a pill. (We sorted out the insurance problem.)
I recently read an article about how Alexander Oshmyansky and Mark Cuban are on a mission from God to deal with absurdly high medication costs. They run a company called CostPlusDrugs.com that sells meds for their factory cost, plus 15%, plus $8 for shipping and handling. They don’t take insurance. They don’t have to waste time and money sorting out insurance things.
If I bought my 90 pills from them they would charge me $9.80 total. Most of that is the shipping and handling cost. That’s $0.11 per pill, or seven times cheaper than CVS for exactly the same med.
I wonder if it’s time to call BS on this medical / information-technology / industrial complex that’s dragging everybody down here in America? Oshmyansky and Cuban definitely are doing that. Companies could support their employees needing meds by accepting receipts from CostPlusDrugs and reimbursing them out of petty cash. Or, we could just pay for many meds ourselves at those costs.
They don’t have everything, sad to say. The don’t have drugs where the patents are still in force. They’re scrambling to add insulin to their inventory as of October 2022. But it’s still a great idea.