The Princeton Packet
If you’re planning a trip to Toms River in the coming weeks, you may want to call ahead and get a prescription filled. That’s because, according to the New Jersey Prescription Drug Price Registry, many popular prescriptions are cheaper there than here — sometimes, substantially cheaper.
The registry has been collecting data on the prices pharmacies charge customers, posting the results on a searchable database at njconsumeraffairs.gov.
There, you’ll find that picking up your Lipitor at the Silverton Pharmacy on Hooper Avenue will save you 11 percent over the best local price.
If you need Albuterol, don’t get your prescription on the way to LBI — get it on your way to McCarter Theatre: you could save a whopping 37 percent buying it in Princeton.
The registry also reports pharmacies in Atlantic City charge from $114 to $146 for 30 tablets of 40 mg Lipitor.
Has it ever been more important to be an informed consumer?
For many people, this information will be meaningless — after all, their insurance or HMO pays it, so who cares what the pharmacy charges?
With insurance and medical care costs continuing to burden more employers and families, we all need to care. Every candidate for the presidency has a plan and a policy, and either way, big changes are coming.
As pharmaceutical treatments become available for almost all medical conditions (even lots of less-than-life threatening conditions), the costs of prescription drugs is a major part of what we pay for medical care, and variations in pricing as revealed by the registry is enough to make many run for their Prilosec.
But it really highlights the runaway peculiarities of our current medical system — all of the charges for these medications are much more than you’d pay if you visit Toronto, and that’s not because of Canada’s universal health care system.
It’s because Americans are being gouged by a grossly inefficient and callous system.
In his book “The New American Story,” former Sen. Bill Bradley offers a recipe for real and meaningful improvement to medical care in the U.S. Among the suggestions are meaningful tort reform to enable medical professionals to own up to mistakes without sacrificing legal protection, standardization of paperwork to eliminate errors, and a free market for pharmaceuticals.
While none of the plans to address the crushing costs of medical care mentioned so far in the national campaigns have focused on these basic ideas, perhaps we could make more improvements by addressing such issues first.
Until then, shop around and do your insurance provider the minimal favor of buying drugs at the lowest cost you can get.
Perhaps then some of those “market forces” can be brought to bear on prescription drug prices.
