Essentially this is my issue and looking for help, advice maybe experiences With the meds I take the authorized program will cost an estimated $2,600 this year mainly because there is one brand drug. There are 3 generics but 2 of those have also had price increases. By purchasing the most expensive 1 of them from an online Canadian pharmacy and then the others from another online pharmacy I am able to bring the costs down to approximately $1,000. The issue is Medicare allows the intermediate companies to charge a penalty that accumulates monthly for NOT buying them from them. An analogy is, there is an assumption that everyone will dine out at some point, but because you don't buy from one of the approved restaurants they are allowed to charge you more as a penalty. My first response is to NOT play their game, buy my meds where ever I chose, but knowing at some point things may change I will put aside a portion of the additional cost every month to cover the expected penalty that will hit me or my family at some point in the future.
Medicare part D is a program with many flaws. Like so much in government health care insurance, it was well-intentioned. There was a move to allow negotiated prices under Medicare when Part D was proposed under the G. W. Bush Administration, but big pharma (a major political contributor) pressured the Congress and the Administration to block that proposal. That was also the biggest flaw in the program since it essentially pumps money from the government in the pockets of the drug companies. There are loopholes in the U.S. drug laws that allow the manufacturers and marketers of drugs to manipulate prices and keep many formulations from becoming generic. The Trump Administration is trying to remedy many of those issues, but the cooperation of Congress will be needed and that is not likely at this point unless it can be done directly through the FDA. Canadian prices are usually lower than ours since the U.S. consumer picks up the tab for most of the research and development costs of new drugs. That was one of the issues used to knock price negotiation out of the Medicare Part D bill. If the U.S. paid the same prices that much of the rest of the world does for drugs, many fewer drugs would be developed, as pharma uses the U.S. consumer and the insurance provisions to finance their research and development. I would look cautiously at Canadian pharmacies online, however, for the last time I checked, Canada has a "pass through" law that allows items and products to be marketed from Canada that are not eligible for sale in Canada. In other words, if you go into a Canadian pharmacy and buy a product, you will be getting a quality product that meets the high Canadian standards. If you order online, however, you could be getting god-knows-what from China that meets no standards of content or quality whatsoever. You MUST know your sources if you order anything online, especially if it comes from outside the U.S.