Health savings accounts of Obama money..
Omeprazol works great, and is cheap. Not only that, but Prevacid has gone OTC and is pretty cheap as well, works good too.
Right after Viagra, to be sold later on the black market.
My insurance won’t cover Nexium. I use Prilosec or the generic from Costco. It works most of the time, but the brief time I did use Nexium I was 100% symptom free. Clearly anecdotal and subject to placebo effect, but it was nice.
My doctor was mad at the drug company for the relatively minor change in the formulation. He thought the better result was probably due to the better method of delivering the drug into the small intestine. It has to survive a lot of stomach acid. That is why it is important to take your dose 30 minutes before your first meal of the day. Thus, before your stomach has produced loads of acid.
Wonder Drug indeed.
“But as a nation we’re all paying for the rest of it.”
This is a ridiculous statement — people buy insurance so they are covered for their medical needs. The insurance companies figure out the premiums so they can pay for the medical care and medications for those who need it and have some profit remaining. That’s how a system works. We are not paying for it “as a nation”.
To single out a particular medication is ridiculous — by doing this the author also implies that all doctors are crooks and aren’t prescribing what is best for the patient.
This whole article is ludicrous and is just trying to rile people up against pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. Maybe Obama was the ghost writer.
I would like to see an article about how limiting the patents to 7 years increased the prices of medications — pharmaceutical companies spend a fortune on developing drugs and now they have to get their investment back and some profits in 7 years. If they let them keep the patents for 30 years, brand name medications would be a lot cheaper.
And based on experience, a lot of people taking Nexium could instead simply change their diet instead to stop the acid reflux. Yet another drug to help us keep up an unhealthy lifestyle without personal consequences.
And add into the mix the ever-lowering standards for cholesterol, blood sugar, and “obesity” and it should become obvious that there is a vast laboratory-pharmeceutical conspiracy to get everyone hooked on prescriptions.
I was issued a perscription for a new medicine called Victoza for my diabetes. Worked great, but my copay was $225 a month. Can’t affort that. Back to the non-working stuff.
And not eating high-carb foods after 5:00 pm ends heartburn entirely - for zero dollars. :)
I’ve found that my doctor has no idea what the drugs he prescribes cost.
I had heartburn for years. Coffee, onions, white bread and anything spicy could cause a flareup which would last up to three days. I lived on Tums and Rolaids.
Then my ex-wife suggested I try Prilosec every other day. I did and the heartburn vanished. It was like a miracle.
That was six years ago. I buy the Great Value workalike from Wal*Mart, same thing, much cheaper.
It is a real pleasure to eat anything I want and not have to worry about heartburn.
More consequences of our broken intellectual property law: develop a new drug, get a patent, all well and good. But what pharmaceutical companies do is then, when the patent is about to run out, change a radical at one point on the molecule, find that it still works, take out another patent on essentially the same discovery, and repeat over and over, touting the “new” drug on which they have a new government granted monopoly as the latest and “best” method for treating whatever.
In the case of Nexium and Prilosec, they just repatented and started marketing one chirality of a pair of mirror image molecules instead of a mixture of both chiralities—and it’s not clear that there is any advantage of using only the one chirality, to anyone other than the drug company, that is.