CONNED BY BIG PHARMA
I rested awhile yesterday after trying to get my covered medicines for the trip through my Medicare Part D plan. Then I started searching for an alternative. Actually I had the easier alternative in mind from the beginning but I had stubbornly insisted on trying to make the bureaucracy work.
I could buy the medicines when I got to Delhi at Nath Brothers Chemists trusted by my dentist and doctors in Delhi on Connaught Place in the center of Delhi. So I looked up the costs of the medicines in India and this is what I learned.
Here my $35 a month Silver Script plan covers all three of my medicines at no cost to me. Because there is no copay on any of them I’ve assumed that the medicines didn’t cost SilverScript very much. When I looked them up on line in India Lisinipril and Metformin both cost about 40 rupees (50 cents) for 10 tablets or five cents apiece. A month’s supply of each costs $1.50 and a month’s supply of Allopurinol costs $2.25. India is a source for a great many of the drugs we buy at inflated prices here in the United States including the drugs in my CVS pharmacy. The lower cost world wide of drugs (made in India) is the argument that Democrats made for wanting Medicare to be able to bargain over drug prices and wanting Americans to be able to import drugs from abroad. But Republicans with the help of Big Pharma wrote and passed Medicare Part D. So this is why my medicines made in India and sold in CVS with certainly a very small shipping charge cost so much here. Of the $35 a month I pay for Part D coverage, a kind of insurance, really highway robbery, $5 is for the medicine and $30 is divied out to Silverscript and CVS. This is the cheapest plan I could find. If my medicines made in India were $20 a month I would probably have to get a $60 a month policy. Of course I could, as was offered on line as I was looking up drug prices in India, order my medicines straight from India. But Big Pharma has made that illegal to do claiming that the Indian made drugs I buy through them are superior to the Indian made drugs I buy in India, which are obviously unsafe because they are not okayed by Big Pharma.
So I’ve learned the lesson that Big Pharma didn’t want me to learn, that there is a giant con in the name of “America knows best” safety that swindles Americans out of huge amounts of money every year. Big Pharma claims that reason their drugs are expensive because they spend so much on research. They should say they are expensive because they spend so much on advertising, trying to get me to suggest to my doctor what he should be prescribing to me and loading my doctor up with free samples to make him complicit. The reason Big Pharma spends any money at all on research isn’t altruism, it isn’t to make a healthier America, it is because when they strike gold they can jack up the price so much that Big Pharma is consistently extremely profitable year after year with plenty of money for lobbying and wooing doctors.
So I feel like a fool for even trying to get SilverScript to cover my medicines for the trip which they could so easily have done. I’ll just pay $7.50 when I get to Nath Brothers on Connaught Place and take care of things myself.
Where is Elizabeth Warren when you need her?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 