Patient Testimonies | April 8, 2025
Hello, my name is Tim Carpenter and I am from Chicago, Illinois.
At 77 years old, I only have a couple of prescriptions refilled on a monthly basis that could be financially problematic while living on a fixed income. These prescriptions are Eliquis, a blood thinner, that I am now taking for a newly diagnosed condition called AFIB at a cost of $710 and Trelegy, an inhaler, that I take for COPD at a cost of $802 every 30 days.
To some, these numbers may not sound like a lot, but I think that for folks that I know who are on fixed incomes like myself, it can make us take a hard look at the month’s budget to try to determine what needs to be either postponed or eliminated for the sake of contingencies that always seem to occur and are never accounted for in advance. These painfully high prescription costs seem to also occur concurrently with newly incurred and often unforeseen doctor and hospital charges which make it all that more difficult to divvy up a month’s fixed income without getting to situations where you start having to play catch up with one bill after another.
While I was still working and was in between jobs, I even recall having resorted to getting my Trelegy prescription through a Canadian pharmacy at a much lower rate until my medical benefits sorted themselves out. Now, while I have Medicare coverage, I am still stuck paying my out of pocket expenses, including the $2,000 out of pocket max, because it is what it is. I know it could be worse, especially if I didn’t have insurance but the problem still persists. – Drug pricing is a controllable factor and Big Pharma deserves a profit making business plan like any other enterprise. That being said, their guidelines and guardrails seem to be non-existent when it comes to profiteering.
There comes a point where claiming that you’re still having to recoup capital expenses and investments to justify the price of the drug starts to feel usury.