First of all, I’d like to give a warm Brutal Insanity welcome to our newest author, the Beautiful Louise Smith, Happy blogging with us!

And now, the topic at hand. Everyone must of heard the saying, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, i for one don’t really eat an apple a day, and never visit a doctor, but that’s not what this is about.

I was a huge E.R fan years ago, but lost interest and respect for the show when Carter left. Nowadays, what little time I spend watching t.v, is spent watching the comedy Scrubs. I love it. An episode that sticks with me, is when the Drugs company rep comes to the hospital, trying to sell a new drug that has amazing capabilities, but they slapped a 500% mark-up on the figure, and that got me thinking. Drugs cost around 20/30p to make, yet they are sold at ridiculous high prices, why the hell does the government let them get away with it!?

**For The Record: The Word Mark-up means; the amount added by a seller to the cost of a commodity to cover expenses and profit in fixing the selling price. E.G With a 100% mark-up on an item costing £10 to produce would be sold on for £20. Production companies, wholesalers and individual stores each add their own mark-up to a product, so they all gain profit.**

One, disturbing, fact I came across looking into this, was before i checked the ‘pages from the UK’ option on google. I came across someone who was moaning about the cost of Prozac. Having taken it for years, paying an average price of $250 per 100 20mg tablets, the person in question was unhappy to discover, from a friend working in the pharmaceuticals industry, that for those 100 20mg tables, the drugs company pays $0.11 to create them. This was just one on a list of many. Prozac in this case, holding a pretty little mark-up figure of 224,973% (On Average).

Are the pharmaceutical companies to blame? Well in many cases yes they are, but in some cases, pharmacies are to be held accountable, also increasing the mark-up figures by around 3,000% themselves.

So lets make a little example out of this. Fred is in need of his prescription, and pops to the local pharmacy. Instead of buying the name brand, the pharmacist recommends the Generic brand, which is say $80 instead of the $100 for the name brand. Fred is happy, as he is saving $20 on this. What little does Fred know, is that the pharmacist paid little over $3 for those 100 tablets. A $77 profit.

Now this isn’t just the case in America, it is the same all over the world. with the same percentages being shown. There are a handful of pharmacies around the world in small towns, who sell the drugs onto the consumers with a ’small mark-up’ of around 100%.

Is it really right that pharmaceutical companies are allowed to ‘play god’, in a way, and mess with lives of people who struggle to afford these drugs, which hold hundreds of thousands of percent in mark-ups.

Who else believes there should be a law in place, preventing these companies from holding such high mark-ups?

Imagine when there’s a drug which completely cures cancer, if the mark-up on Prozac, and drugs alike, are pushing, or passing 300,000%, what will the mark-up be on a drug that removes cancer? Millions?

Have a nice day everyone.

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Tags: Doctors, Drugs, mark-up, Markup, Pharmaceutical company

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.