> That’s why a consumer without insurance saves money by having access to a PBM’s network rate, which is lower than the cash price. GoodRx provides a convenient and user-friendly interface for finding these PBM rates. Essentially, GoodRx is a PBM-backed program that passes a portion of rebates and network discounts off list directly to patients at the point of sale.<p>Having had to deal with this hassle in the past, I'm glad GoodRx exists. I don't know of any other industry that charges a higher cash price than medical insurance price.<p>Note: Costco pharmacy is slightly more competitive if you want your prescription mailed to you. Like GoodRx, you can compare pricing on Costco's website.
Every time I read anything about US healthcare I find it incredible that everyone there isn’t demonstrating in the streets every day to get it changed.<p>This is a thread is from 2019, when I accidentally discovered how much Americans might pay for a worming tablet: <a href="https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1199026735980990465" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jawj/status/1199026735980990465</a>
Long ago, before goodrx and when my family did not have any drug coverage I learned the magic incantation "Is that the best price you can find?". I was always amazed that they would then spend a few minutes on their computers and find a price 50% to 80% cheaper than the original price they quoted me.
Last time I had to get a prescription, paying cash with a GoodRX coupon was 25% cheaper than my out of pocket cost with insurance would have been.<p>The mind boggles.
Extremely high barrier to entry + (necessary) complex regulatory structure = industry with fewer players.<p>And in that situation, you've basically got breeding grounds for cartels and price-fixing. Even if not all the players hold the line, prices will take a long time to come down rather than how quickly they would in a high-competition market.<p>Heck look at how long it took carriers to stop charging insane money for SMS! It did eventually happen, but over the course of years as each carrier in turn put through small incremental price reductions to show growth for shareholders.
I have excellent coverage but I've given up and for the last year been buying my topicals from India. This country really needs to re-evaluate which drugs really need to be gated by a prescription and which are essentially harmless. I loved visiting pharmacies when I was abroad. A few bucks for a few pills and that was that. Once my doctor here started telling me I could only get certain drugs from certain "specialty pharmacies" I had enough. The system isn't broke. It's engineered to screw everyone.
My wife is a pharmacist and she has a love-hate relationship with GoodRX. She deals with lots of people who don’t have good insurance or can’t afford their prescriptions and she is glad GoodRX offers benefits to these people but it is also a pain in the ass to administer. Pharmacies can’t just “look up” the price of a drug and switch between insurance, cash and GoodRX. It requires re-running basically the entire transaction and slows down their process, which considering how over worked they are is a bit of an annoyance.
> its adjusted net income—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA)—is an astonishing 40%.<p>Canadian telecom has better margins. Our government still thinks it's competitive (?)<p>> The media division had a 20 per cent profit margin in the fourth quarter, while the wireless division had a 45.1 per cent margin.<p>Lately they've been chopping away their media divisions for not being profitable enough...<p><a href="https://www.wellandtribune.ca/ts/business/2021/02/13/the-faceoff-bce-and-rogers-each-have-significant-media-holdings-but-are-focusing-on-their-more-lucrative-wireless-divisions.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.wellandtribune.ca/ts/business/2021/02/13/the-fac...</a>
I used to work with one of the CEOs, Doug. He was the first “adult” at Facebook and apparently helped create Facebook Photos. Quite impressive. Also after being heavily diluted at GoodRX, he and the other CEO managed to get new stock grants worth $500M at IPO. Wow.
It reminds me of “sudo make me a sandwich”<p>The idea that I tell a pharmacist an arbitrary number I found on the internet and the price of the medication suddenly drops 80%…<p>Good on GoodRX for making this process less obfuscated, but wow the market is broken if that is how it works.
why? i don't understand why medicine in US is not priced just like commodities, milk and bread?
In india you have 2 major types of medicine.<p>1. proprietary combinations which are sold by companies at a market rate "printed maximum retail price" which includes kickbacks to doctors, medical representative salaries and all profits. Other companies also make the combinations so its not like sky high rates with one company, market adjusts itself. The rates are expensive but people have to live with it.<p>2. Generic medicine. the govt markets generic medicine of around 700 combinations which are priced at usually 10% the proprietary prices because there are no kickbacks to doctors, no reps and stuff. Same is sold by private companies also who find generic medicine profitable.<p>The thing is, in india, medical insurance is still not prevalent. The companies cannot inflate the prices 1000% next month and expect everyone to continue buying the product.<p>In the US, medical insurance companies finance these pharma companies to keep highly inflated prices and its all fine for the consumer only if they are insurance buyers. For others, tough luck
I've read quite a bit about how the PBM model works and GoodRX, and still can't figure out how the system works and why?<p>From other sources, it appears that pharmacies actually lose money when accepting GoodRX discounts, and yet are unable or unwilling to lower their prices.<p>Very bizarre!
The challenge I had was getting the pharmacy to actually correctly code the transaction to GoodRxs PBM. Especially when you have multiple prescriptions and different PBMs for each one, they often get screwed up, and charge the wrong one.
Adam Fein is well known in the industry and his blog is a great source of info on how drug distribution works in the US. A real rabbit hole if you want.
This is written like they are disrupting the model, but in reality GoodRx is just another pharmacy in the old model. Operating exactly the same way of taking kickbacks from PBMs who in turn raid the drug producers while driving price hikes most often eating up well above 50% of those price hikes themselves.<p>Seems the only difference is “it’s a tech company” which changes their valuation and ability to raise capital, but they still don’t seem to actually be disrupting anything, just another cog in the broken machine.<p>Or am I missing something?
The real crazy story is how anyone can buy any CAS numbered compound from a lab for usually thousands of times less per mg than at a pharmacy.<p>An example is Azithromycin, which typically costs about $15/pill at 500mg, yet if you buy it direct from a lab that syntethizes the compound themselves at 99% purity, it costs around $0.04 for the same pill.
Does Amazon Pharmacy do the same? (<a href="https://pharmacy.amazon.com/" rel="nofollow">https://pharmacy.amazon.com/</a>)