President Trump has said repeatedly that Americans should not be paying more for our drugs than people in other wealthy counries, but he has yet to do anything about that. However, as David Maris explains in StatNews, you can still buy your drugs from abroad and save bundles of money.
Maris ordered a Miebo prescription online. It’s a dry eye drug, which costs around $800 in the U.S. He paid $32 for it, including shipping, to buy it over-the-counter from another country. Check out PharmacyChecker to see what drugs you can order from verified pharmacies abroad at tremendous savings.
In 2021 RAND, a research organization, published a study showing that, on average, Americans pay more than 2.5 times for our drugs than people in 32 other developed nations. This shouldn’t be. We import food from abroad all the time, we should be able to import drugs for personal use. Indeed, many of the drugs we buy in the US are imported from abroad but with a big fat pricetag.
In the case of Miebo, the dry eye drug, Bausch & Lomb was able to get the FDA to approve it as a prescripion drug in the US, even though it is sold over-the-counter in Europe. Because it’s a prescripion drug in the US, Bausch & Lomb can keep raising the price of the drug to 40 times what it costs in Europe!
To be clear, even with insurance, Miebo’s cost to Americans is high. And, its insane price drives up people’s prescription drug and health care premiums. Bausch & Lomb wants it to remain a prescripion drug in the US even though it could and should be sold as an over-the-counter drug here; it meets the test of over-the-counter drugs: people can use it safely on their own.
The solution: Any drug that is sold OTC abroad should be classified as OTC in the US. That would drive competition and reduce prescription drug costs.
The challenge: Most of our members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, support pharmaceutical company price-gouging in the US, whether they say so or not. It would be extremely easy and effective for them to put their constituents first and insist on negotiated drug prices for all Americans. At the very least, they should make it easy for Americans to import drugs from abroad and require insurers to cover their costs.
Here’s more from Just Care:
- Six tips for keeping your drug costs down if you have Medicare
- Always appeal your health insurers’ denials; you have a high likelihood of success
- Online pharmacies can save you money
- Case study: Costco saves one couple hundreds of dollars over Medicare Part D
- John Oliver explains Medicare and the dangers of Medicare Advantage
