The Drug Pricing Scandal and How the Sick are Ripped off in Australia.

First, apologies to the die hard Health IT readers. For once I am going to stray from the chosen Health IT path, due to a deep sense of gob smacked outrage.

In the last week or so we have had the Federal Health Minister – Mr Tony Abbott – claiming he has just done a wonderful job negotiating a great reduction of the cost of generic prescription medicines and how grateful we all should be.

Without putting too fine a point on it that was just total codswallop.

A day or so the Wall Street Journal made available the pricing for Generic Prescription Medicine from Wal-Mart – the US retail chain. I grabbed the seven page price list document to see just what was on offer.

Essentially what is available is one months supply of a very large range of life saving medicines in a wide range of therapeutic classes for $US4.00 – i.e. $A5.30 per month.

Included in the list are Anti-Allergy, Anti-Inflammatory, Anti-Anxiety, Anti- Depressant Anti-Psychotic and so on medicines. Also included are a wide range of antibiotics (including Penicillin, Amoxycillin, Bactrim, Cephalosporins and even Ciprofloxin), 2 statins drugs, some hormones (e.g. Thyroid Replacement Therapy and Prednisone) and even multi-vitamins and Prozac.

The only major class of drug I could not find were the proton pump inhibitors for which the H2 Receptor Antagonists are nearly as good and just as safe. The PPIs will be off patent very soon I am sure (They are in Australia I believe) or it might be they are a bit more costly to manufacture.

The stand out saving for me was that Meloxicam – an anti-inflammatory for osteo-arthritis that I take was available for $5.30 a month rather than the $29.50 I presently pay! Without going into details my monthly $100 prescription costs could be adjusted down to about $20 a month with little or no change in the quality or safety of my treatment.

This really is a huge con with the drug companies and the pharmacists getting rich off the back of those unlucky enough to need prescription medicine. With this fix in a huge number of people are being ripped off and many, I am sure, are missing out on effective medicines that could make a great difference to the quality and quantity of their lives due to costs they may not be able to afford.

Our much vaunted Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme looks to like a wonderful cosy drug company – pharmacist – government cartel to me. Transparent it certainly is not and how – with these sort of savings possible – one can justify keeping the supermarkets out of the area is beyond belief.

We will now return to our usual program with that off my chest.

David.

Note – Please e-mail me if you want a copy of the list – its only about 50Kbyte so easy to e-mail.