Generic drugs are often thought of as bargains. But in the last year, the prices of many generic medicines have skyrocketed and pharmacists across Vermont say they and their customers are taking a hit. Jason Hochebert is one of the owners of Rutland Pharmacy, a family-owned business with four locations.
He says generic prices have been all over the place lately. He picks up a bottle of Digoxin for instance, a popular heart medicine. “Yeah,” says Hochberg, “without warning it went from under $100 for a bottle to over a couple hundred dollars a bottle. Creams are another one - nystatin creams and triamcinolone creams which are your generic steroid or anti fungal creams - they’ve also skyrocketed in price.” He says, “they used to be like $1.69 for a small tube and now it’s 12 bucks. That may not seem like a lot on the grand scale, but that’s 1000%.”
Ken Wilkins of Mount Tabor stops in Hochberg’s pharmacy to pick up his medicine. “As a newly diagnosed diabetic, I have to take more drugs,” says Wilkins. “And it seems like they’re changing them all the time. And it is an issue for someone who’s retired and on a fixed income.”
For patients on Medicare or with low deductible insurance, the price hikes may be less noticeable. But Jim Godfrey, President of the Vermont Pharmacists Association, says the situation has hit those without insurance hard. “When you’ve been paying $30 cash a month for meds and then all of a sudden it goes up ten fold, you’ve got a $300 a month medication all of a sudden - this can be a significant issue.”
He and other pharmacists say it’s frustrating because the price hikes seem so random.
But Robert Jaffe says there's nothing random about it. Jaffe is a spokesman for Lannett Company, which makes and sells close to 80 different generic drugs. In an email to VPR, Jaffe wrote that drug prices are affected by numerous market forces including the increase in cost for hard to find raw materials, new steps in the Food and Drug Administration product development process, as well as what he described as a dramatic increase in fees for submitting a generic drug application.
Rutland Pharmacy’s Jason Hochberg understands the economics, but he and other pharmacists complain that insurance reimbursements aren’t keeping up with the price increases.
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