March 19, 2007
Disparity in Prescription Drug Prices
Stephen J. Dubner blogging about the disparity in prescription drug prices.
Several weeks ago, I was talking to a physician in Houston, the sort of older gentleman family doctor you don’t see much of anymore. His name is Cyril Wolf. He’s originally from South Africa, but other than that, he struck me as the quintessential American general practitioner of decades past.
I’d asked him a variety of questions — what’s changed in recent years in his practice, how managed care has affected him, etc. — when suddenly his eyes fired up, his jaw set tight, and his voice took on a tone of great exasperation. He began to describe a simple but huge problem in his practice: a lot of generic medications are still too expensive for his patients to afford. Many of his patients, he explained, must pay for their drugs out-of-pocket, and yet even the generic drugs at pharmacy chains like Walgreens, Eckerd, and CVS could cost them dearly.
So Wolf began snooping around and found that two chains, Costco and Sam’s Club, sold generics at prices far, far below the other chains. Even once you factor in the cost of buying a membership at Costco and Sam’s Club, the price differences were astounding. Here are the prices he found at Houston stores for 90 tablets of generic Prozac:
Walgreens: $117
Eckerd: $115
CVS: $115
Sam’s Club: $15
Costco: $12
Those aren’t typos. Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12.
This disparity in the cost of prescription drugs is interesting when you look at maps of these four retailers in the Cleveland area.
Map of CVS locations with a pharmacy in the Cleveland area.
Map of Walgreens locations with a pharmacy in the Cleveland area.
Map of Costco locations with a pharmacy in the Cleveland area.
Map of Sam's Club locations with a pharmacy in the Cleveland area.
The question becomes, "Where can one buy affordable prescription generic drugs in the city of Cleveland?"
WXYZ.com (Detroit) has a more exhaustive analysis of generic drug prices for the Detroit area.