mark up on drugs

Food for thought And the alternative is to use natural products

The markup
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A couple of years ago, the Life Extension Foundation listed the cost of the key ingredients of several best selling prescription drugs. Here's a quick breakdown of just a few:

Prilosec consumer price: $360.97 for 100 20mg tabs. The active ingredient costs a little more than 50 cents per tab. The markup: more than 69,000 percent.

Norvasc consumer price: $188.29 for 100 10mg tabs. The active ingredient costs 14 cents per tab. The markup: more than 134,000 percent.
Prozac consumer price: $247.47 for 100 20mg tabs. The active ingredient costs 11 cents per tab. The markup: nearly 225,000 percent

Of course, there's quite a bit more to drug production than just active ingredients. But even after you consider the cost of research and development, manufacturing, marketing, packaging, legal fees, etc., you're left with an easy-to-understand equation: Consumers pay through the nose while major drug companies make billions in profits each year. "