Prescription look-up tool shows actual drug costs

Prescription drug prices have been a confounding mystery to most consumers.

One obvious question: Why are some drugs so wildly expensive — thousands of dollars for a single pill — when others are pennies apiece?

And then, if we really think about it, more questions emerge: How are drug prices determined? By whom? What’s the true cost? And how much are manufacturers, the pharmacists and everyone in between making as the drugs move through the system to the consumer?

As The Dispatch has shown in a series of stories during the past year, the drug supply chain that includes drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers, wholesalers, insurers and pharmacists is a complex maze.

Among the dozens of stories in the Dispatch’s ongoing Side Effects series, one that has been most immediately beneficial to consumers was one of the shortest.

That story in October launched the Dispatch drug look-up tool that will give people a clearer picture of what their drugs should cost. It’s available with the entire series online at Dispatch. com/sideeffects.

Click on the “drug price database” tab in the menu bar at the top of the page and plug in the name of the drug you want to check. The tool,

updated monthly, provides those who buy brand-name and generic drugs a better idea of how much they should be paying for drugs.

Data in the lookup tool are updated monthly, and thousands of consumers have accessed it since we posted it about three months ago.

Numbers in the database, which dates to 2013, are gathered by the federal

government to give Medicaid departments a baseline of drug prices. But consumers can use these numbers to ask questions of their pharmacist, health-care provider and employers.

The prices come from the government’s National Average Drug Acquisition Cost. The NADAC list comes from a national survey of community pharmacies of their invoice prices.

The database does not contain medications in a liquid form or inhalers because those medications vary widely on dosage and

potency.

Eric Pachman, a former Dayton-area pharmacy manager and founder of the drugprice transparency website 46brooklyn. com, told Dispatch reporter Lucas Sullivan that the database can be valuable to consumers.

"While it’s not perfect, NADAC is hands down the best free public resource we have to get educated on the underlying prices of the medications our pharmacies purchase, and we consume," Pachman said. "We should all be using it to get smarter

on drug prices."

Pharmacists and those pushing for more transparency said the Dispatch drug-price look-up toolprovides another level of transparency.

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