Follow me if you can. A few weeks ago, Wal-Mart announced that they would be selling certain generic drugs for $4.00 in the State of Florida on a sort of test program. Believe it or not, people liked it and so they expanded it to 14 states, with the rest of us waiting for our turn. Meijers, a chain competitor in the mid-west, announced this week that they would do one better. They are now offering for free popular anti-biotics normally prescribed for children. That's right...free. It was suggested by an industry spokesman that the reason Meijer was able to give the drug away free was that generic drugs cost the retailer very little so there wasn't much cost there to write off. Did you get that? So little cost that Meijer Stores can simply give it away.
Now we come to my question. I was recently diagnosed diabetic. I have two prescriptions that cost me a total of $64.00. Fortunately they are generic. If they weren't, according to Wal-Mart, it would have cost me close to $200.00. So we go from $200.00 to $64.00 to $4.00 to free in a matter of a paragraph, remembering that the "industry spokesman" said that there was such little cost in generic drugs that it wouldn't cost the retailer much to give them away.
And there are people that wonder why we are looking for a National Drug Plan. The same people, I may add, that are surprised that some of us think that the group in Washington should not only be changed but that they represent everything evil in this world and in a more sane society, they would surely be arrested for being criminals.
I will keep paying whatever the Retail/Pharmaceuticals dictate that I pay for my "life-sustaining" drugs, but I will not be quiet about it.
Mick