Let me start off by saying I'm free market guy. That said with pharma I think we all know its not exactly a free market situation. So I go to doc today as allergies are still nuts and eyes are a complete mess. He gives me steroid shots and a script for eye drops as he says they are infected. He gives me a coupon for the eye drops also. I go pick them up and give the coupon. With insurance and coupon it's 25 bucks. Now it's about a 3ml bottle of stuff. People have been getting eye infections/pink eye forever. If I had no insurance the cost of this little bottle was almost 200 bucks. I noticed on the discount card it had issuer info etc. Now my questions are this. 1. Is the doctor getting a kick back for prescribing this stuff? 2. If I didn't have insurance does the doctor prescribe something different? I would think as common as what I have is there are treatments, meds, etc that cost far less than 200 bucks for a tiny bottle of drops. It's not the money as I only paid 25 bucks it just makes you wonder and since I have never been without insurance I haven't seen other side of this.

It is not legal for a doctor to receive money from drug companies. Not saying it doesn't happen, but it is not legal.

Drug reps do track their prescribing doctors though. And when they decide to take one of their customers skiing or hunting, who do you think they take?

It's $200 bucks because the patent has not expired. Therefore there is no competition in the market. I had the same script for my cataract surgery. I could either pay the $200 or accept a cheaper alternative covered by my insurance.

if you werent in the good ol US it would be $15

Almost every script i have gotten went generic because the brand names are so expensive, so the doc and big pharm co are not benefitting there. Not sure about the eye drops you got or other meds that dont have generic equals

We do not receive any money or incentive of any kind from drug companies. Illegal for us to accept that and illegal for a drug company to offer it. We try very hard to Rx the lowest cost drug we can while still appropriately treating the illness, however we have no control over costs or what an insurance plan will cover for any particular drug.

ever go have your car fixed after an accident and they cover the deduct? they jack up the price and then cover your deduct and still kill it. If you say you dont have insur all of a sudden its half of what it was going to cost.

We were at my wifes Dr. yesterday. The Dr. wants her to take the name brand as she believes it works better. She was telling the Dr. that the pharmacy fills the script with generic a lot of times and seems to try and push the generic to her. I think both are $30 w/ insurance. Dr. started going on a rant about how they make more money on generic or something. I lost interest after about 2 seconds listening to those 2 hens yuk it up, so I pretended like I got a call and bailed out.

WAWI see what happens to your eyes when you stare into headlights at the boat ramp too much.

my point is as long as they have been treating pink eye there must be a generic. I suspect I'm getting the latest and greatest because I have insurance. I'm not worried about the script cost as I have prescription coverage, I do tend to wonder that if a lot less of this nonsense went on I may pay less than 2k a month for health insurance.

Why are you not fishing? This is unacceptable.

It was not on the radar for me to fish today. Maybe tomorrow. It's hard to get serious about fishing when your eyes are in the shape mine are.

Usually Generics seem to be like $3 haha, my GF is a pharmacist and they dont get anything for selling generics vs brand name. Generics just tend to be cheaper usually and it is the same thing so a lot of times they try to save people money by suggesting generic. Or they will not have brand name on hand so all they can offer is generic. Obviously there are always exceptions but this is just from what i have learned from her

Man that sucks! Sorry man. Prolly all the mountain cedar blowing in. It's redickokous!

I don't know about now but 15 years ago Dr.s didn't get money but they did get some nice gifts.
Golf clubs, trips etc. By the way I'm not making this up, I have family that have worked in Dr.s offices and two retired Dr.s.
I got my first set of clubs this way because the doctor didn't want them so he gave them to me.
If there was a generic the Dr. would probably prescribe that instead if requested. I believe that they now have prescribe the cheapest if generic is available.