My husband and I needed Zofran for gastroenteritis last week. I went to the local (commercial) pharmacy to pick up 15 tablets of generic Zofran ODT. The pharmacy tech told me it costs $16.50. I asked her if she had our insurance info and she replied, "Oh yeah. Your insurance saved you a lot of money! The price of this medication is $880, and now it's $16.50 with insurance." I checked Goodrx before going to the pharmacy, so I told her to use the Goodrx coupon instead of using my insurance, and that brought the Zofran cost down to $13.
So if patients didn't have insurance and didn't know about programs like Goodrx, that pharmacy would have charged $880. Inability to afford medications is an all too familiar situation for patients in our country.
That's not the only part that is outrageous.
What's outrageous is that I checked the price of Zofran online with a wholesale pharmacy after I got home, and 30 tabs of Zofran ODT costs approximately $3. The local commercial pharmacy's excessive markup of this drug made me furious - I can understand selling the medication for 20% or 50% more to cover shipping or packaging costs, but in this case, the markup for this drug by that pharmacy was likely 2,923%!
This is just another example of how our healthcare system is failing patients.
I am looking forward to practicing direct primary care so that I will soon be able to access and dispense wholesale meds for patients, not only saving them a trip to the pharmacy, but saving them from paying these exorbitant upcharges for medications!
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