cats

Pet Meds

by any1mark

There’s an interesting thing in the American health system.  Mergers and outsourcing products have conspired with “universal” health care.  In a truly American way, the only winners are the drug companies. I have found this by having an asthmatic cat.

My little girl is 15 years old.  She has regiment of drugs that keep her from wheezing.  They drugs are all human drugs.  This means I can go to any pharmacy and supposedly they will be available as they are common.  Well, interesting thing when insurance companies are involved.  They can change the compensation they get from insurance companies.  If you had thousands of drugs to sell it might be hard to pick a new price every month, but these are dedicated people!

It was just fine when her Flovent went from $125  to $190 by about ten dollars each refill.  That was every other month.  Now it took away my breath each time, I should have used some of it. But she has a prednisone prescription but that’s $15 every two months from the veterinarian.  Now here’s the best part.  At the human pharmacy, it’s double.  The reason Obamacare.  The increase in coverage had no provisions for price control.  Meaning if you failed to enroll you were penalized by fees and drug costs.  Because the powers that be, never think of the consequences of their laws.

But why am I here today?  The pharmacy game is mergers among generic drugs.  Large companies with brand names rake in billions in higher costs. They have based pricing on research money and time required to bring drugs to market.  But generic drugs, well now these are cheap knock outs that are crazy profitable .  There’s no fees to the developer as patient is expired.  But that’s not good enough for giant profits.  So they get bought out and the drugs are made overseas.  The standards that the US government puts on formularies for drug manufactures is tops in the world.  That means a common drug made for decades has been wait approval since November!  The drug very common is not available because of this.  One marker makes almost all of the drug.  It took twenty calls, to every thing from chains to small stores.  Finally, I found an online place.  But it’s not all easy because I have a veterinarian in a different state who doesn’t like online places because some sell outdated drugs!  

And the compounding online pharmacy is at least fresh stuff.  Now that federal hiring freeze, nothing is getting done as far as approving anything being imported.  It’s not looking good.  I hope no one else is stuck in this place.  But sooner or later, it’ll hit people hard.  We have outsourced a bit to far.