Saving $ on prescription drugs

I do not know if this is accurate or not, our co pays are negligible.

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/category/meds

"Patients are used to paying a high price for branded medications, and pharmacies know this. So when a new generic becomes available, many pharmacies discount the medication, but only by a small fraction as little as 10- 15%, However, the patient buying the prescription sees the new generic medication is somewhat cheaper and appreciates paying a little less for it. Over the course of a year or two, the price at the pharmacy retailer falls little by little. Eventually the generic medication stabilizes at a much lower price — as low as a tenth of the original, non-generic price. Meanwhile, the patient never realizes that they have been paying a very steep mark-up that constitutes as much as 15 times the wholesale price.

How did I come to realize this? Because for nearly four years I have run a cost comparison web site for healthcare called LesliesList.org that serves the Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth communities, and will become available in New York City by the end of this year.

Consider the example of anastrozole, a generic breast-cancer drug whose brand name is Arimidex. When a drug enters the generic market it can be produced by a wide array of manufacturers, usually within 6 months. The wholesale prices of these generics are subject to normal market forces and drop dramatically—but these cost savings are initially enjoyed by the major pharmacy retail drug purchasers and pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs, who are responsible for negotiating drug prices for insurance companies. But not by you and me. A few months after going generic in August 2010, the branded version of anastrozole, was selling for more than $400 for a month’s supply. The generic form was sold for $361 at CVS, $360 at Walgreens and about $340 at Walmart and Target. Sounds like a bargain, right?

Actually it was not. You might be interested to know that Costco has a well-publicized pricing strategy of charging the wholesale price plus a standardized 14% mark-up on everything it sells, including prescriptions. So how much was Costco charging at the time for this life-saving cancer drug? $27 per month. So we can deduce that the wholesale price at that time would have been around $24, which means that the major retail pharmacies were charging quite a hefty mark-up.

Why bring this up now? Because the generics of two of the all-time biggest-selling prescriptions, atorvastatin (Lipitor) and clopidogrel (Plavix), are at roughlythe same point in their pricing cycle as anastrozole was in 2010. What are their retail prices? From January 2013 through March 2013, thirty tabs sell for:"..............................

And it's even cheaper in Canada......but so far our elected officials are uninterested in allowing us to buy from Canada, or allow groups, like Seniors/Medicare to negotiate for lower prices.

archer wrote: And it's even cheaper in Canada......but so far our elected officials are uninterested in allowing us to buy from Canada, or allow groups, like Seniors/Medicare to negotiate for lower prices.

Be that as it may, do you have any knowledge that this kind of ordes of magnitude saving are currently available to US citizens by shopping at Costco?

I also have unconfirmed Intel that a membership is not required to shop at their pharmacy.

We have shopped at Costco for prescriptions for years, started when Zocor became a generic and even with insurance the copay was $30/month at the drugstore......yet at Costco the price was $9/month with or without insurance. They are also much cheaper on prescription glasses.....

However, if you take a brand name Rx, the savings at Costco are not as great....that's when being able to buy in Canada would be nice.