The price of your pills: $5 each, or two for $15

So I'm officially over the hill now. Not only am I 41, but the doctor says my blood pressure is absurd, even though my cholesterol is half the healthy level (I'll try to remember to tell more on that later) So he prescribes a pill that works - it does wonders at 10mg, and I ask him if I can up the dosage since I notice it wearing off halfway through the day.

He ups it to 40mg. It really does the trick.

So I go to the pharmacy to get the new refil, and I'm on my ass in the aise of the drugstore after I get the bill: Get this - the old 10mg x 30 days was $6.00. Got that? So if I had taken the same 10mg pills four times per day, that would be a total of 1200 mg for the month at a cost of 4 x $6.00 or, $24.00

But if you ask for 40mg pills of the same medication - I checked, it's not time-release, or with any special coating - it's $56.85 for 30 days.

So I get daring and ask the doctor if he can go back and write me a prescription for the old 10mg pills and just prescribe 4x the quantity, so I will be taking 120 pills per month at a total cost of $24 instead of 30 pills per month at a total cost of $56.85 - and the receptionist says, "will your insurance let you do that?"

And I said, "huh?" I told her I don't have insurance, and the reason I'm making the switch is that because cash-out-of-pocket I could use the extra $32 a month given that I'm getting exactly the same dosage. She says, "Well some insurance plans won't let you do that..."

And there it is folks; how your government helped out the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry at the same time. If the 40mg pills are the ones that the doctor prescribes more often, you multiply the price by almost 250%. And if your uppity patient complains, you tell them that the rules don't allow common sense to intervene.

Now you have to wonder if mathematical shenanigans like this are why the Medicare prescription drug plan is something that Bush was so proud of, despite the fact that it was yet another unfunded mandate (the kind only Democrats are supposed to be guilty of proposing). Because if Medicare can't recognize they're getting reamed a hole that's two-and-a-half-times the size of the pill going into it, then we should all be slapped for letting it happen.

So - in the end, ONLY because I don't have insurance and my doctor has a brain that can do simple accounting, I have dropped back to the 10mg pill, only now I take four of them at once with the same glass of water, and I have saved $34 a month, or $394 per year to get the same quantity of medication. I still get 1200 mg per month, only at less than half the cost. .