Cancer medications can cost several thousand dollars a month. Knowing the tough decision some patients have to make about their medication, one Austin-based pharmacist decided not to profit from cancer medicine anymore.
CBS 42 Medical Watch reporter Seema Mathur looked into the cost of cancer medication.
The online
www.smartchoicedrugstore.com based in Austin has been filling prescriptions for about a year.
Then, a recent phone call from a cancer patient prompted the founder to rethink how they sell cancer medications.
"Should we be making a profit at all on cancer medications and the bottom line was no," said Chatrick Clark, CEO of
www.smartchoicedrugstore.com. "We shouldn't be doing that and that's how the program started."
At the pharmacy, a pharmacy technician lets a caller from Iowa know they are selling all cancer drugs at cost, with zero profit.
"We'd be saving her about $160 every three months so she was very excited," said pharmacy tech Kara Perez with
smartchoicedrugstore.com.
An example of the savings
www.smartchoicedrugstore.com says they can offer on cancer medications: 30 pills of tamoxifin is sold for $71.99 at Walgreens...
Smart choice offers it for $9.79. Thirty tablets of tarceva costs $3, 176.19 cents at Walgreens, compared to $2,602.
The same quantity of arimidex is sold for $275.99 at Walgreens;
smartchoicedrugstore.com sells it at $212.16.
"They need those drugs to live and why should they decide between staying alive and making an electric bill payment," pharmacist Judy Welch said.
This online drug store still plans to be successful, but not at the expense of cancer patients.
Experts say in the last year the cost of cancer drugs climbed 15-percent, five times more than other prescriptions.
The pharmacist at
smartchoicedrugstore.com says that even for people who have insurance, often the insurance won't pay for all cancer medications. And that was one of the reasons
smartchoicedrugstore.com singled out cancer medicine to not make a profit on.
Labels: No Prescription, Online Pharmacy, Prescription Drugs
# posted by Network @ 5:51 AM
