Coloradans turn to Canada for Meds
Mark Flora uses a mouse to cross the Canadian border and land a 60 percent cut in the cost of his father's prescription medicine.
He clicks onto the online Canadian pharmacy canadameds.com and pays $215 for a 90-day supply of bromocriptine mesylate. The drug helps his 74-year-old father, James, a Lakewood resident with Parkinson's disease.
At Walgreens, King Soopers or other local pharmacies, the Floras would have paid $850 to $1,025 for the same drug.
"My dad is on Social Security and a pension, and basically he couldn't afford the drug he was required to take," Mark Flora said. "Affordability forced me to go through the hoops and order from Canada."
Likewise, 48-year-old Gregory Gille of Colorado Springs cut his monthly tab from $210 to about $100 for medicine to treat his chronic heart and gout conditions.
After 19 years in the semiconductor industry, Gille was laid off and lost his health insurance. He used an Internet search engine to shop for better drug prices.
"I started with pharmacies and spread out from there," said Gille, who ended up at the CrossBorderPharmacy.com Web site. "It took less than 30 seconds to crunch the numbers."
He found he could reduce costs by 50 percent.
Gille is one of more than 1,000 Coloradans who have quietly turned to CrossBorderPharmacy.com over the past month as a remedy to high prescription drug costs. The Calgary-based online pharmacy opened its doors on Jan. 23, and it has been inundated with requests from California, Florida and other states, said Dave Robertson, head pharmacist for CrossBorderPharmacy.
Others have turned to a variety of other online Canadian pharmacies. Seniors with Medicare HMO policies that have limited drug benefits, uninsured and others can quickly find price comparison charts for drugs such as Claritin and Lipitor.
Mark Flora discovered that canadameds.com charges $236.21 for 300 5-milligram tablets of the generic drug bromocriptine mesylate, a cost of about 79 cents per capsule. The brand-name version at Walgreens' Web site would have cost $899, about $3 per capsule.
canadameds.com is among the largest online pharmacy operations in Canada, shipping an average of 600 prescriptions a day.
Customers wanting to purchase drugs from Canadian pharmacies must provide a detailed medical history and have their doctor send a prescription, Robertson said.
Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines, U.S. residents can import up to three months worth of medications for personal use. Controlled substances such as pain medication are not allowed to be imported.
Flora said he got his drugs in factory-sealed bottles with expiration dates.
"The only inconvenience was that it's about a three- or four-week process," Flora said.
The pharmaceutical industry contends that lowering prices in the United States would impede research and development. Price controls result in fewer breakthrough medicines, said Meredith Art, a spokeswoman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association.
close window