I recently received the following e-mail from E, a close friend of mine:
I got [my prescription] filled tonight which cost me $50 (too much, I will have to investigate), but get this, the receipt says that insurance was billed $1330!! With that and the co-pay, $1380 total. Un-freaking-believable. And that's just a one month supply. $16,560/yr. What in hell would people w/o insurance (but an income) or who had crappy insurance do? I [previously] got free goods b/c I was unemployed. But consider some single dude who worked at construction and who had no insurance, but still pulled down maybe 28K annually. By the limits of the Glaxo program he would be SOL. Step up to the plate and show us that $17K buddy.
The drug companies are always whining about how they need their patent protection and the resulting high prices in order to recoup the cost of development and bringing a drug to market. So OK, I'll pretend to accept that for the moment. THEN, when their patent actually runs out, after something like 18 years I think, and when they've presumably made a nice profit from the drug, what do they do? They repackage it slightly (like this Lamical, which is now generic), in my case into an extended-release package, and re-patent it. The XR [extended release] stuff is the exact same drug as the original, it just dissolves differently. $17K/yr.
I think Canada is the place to get old in. I still haven't heard back from them on my Permanent Resident application. They must have quite a backlog of Americans.
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