My Cardiologist scheduled me for another leg angiogram and sents, and I love this procedure for what it does for 750-year-old coot, restoring blood flow and removing leg pains. She wanted to replace my 81 mg aspirin with 2.5 mg Xarelto twice a day tho. She even gave me a 30-day sample supply along with a prescription I could renew for a year.
"OK, doc, thanks" I started shopping...
"Rivaroxaban was patented in 2007 and approved for medical use in the United States in 2011.[9] In the United States, it will not be available as a generic medication until 2024.[10][11] It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.[12] In 2020, it was the 86th most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 8 million prescriptions." Great stuff I guess. It had better be for
$1,000 a month!
GoodRX.com says I can buy it locally in a 90-day supply to save on costs for a little over $3,000. Healthwarehouse.com offered it to me for $1,757 which gets it down to $585 a month. My part D cost was a little lower, but not much. So I found Liferxpharmacy.com which seems to checkout fine as a respectable and fully certified mail-order pharmacy. It seems that while Rivaroxaban is patented by one owner, it licenses other firms to manufacture it under certain terms. Natco in India does, along with many other drugs shipped to US pharmacies like Tamiflu, but they have an agreement to sell it "in India only" for so much less. Liferxpharmacy buys it in India and ships it to me in a 168-count package for
$188 = $67 a month!
This box was actually made by Bayer in India, marked "for sale in India only," but that was fine by me. You can pay more at Liferxpharmacy to get it made in Turkey, Canada, or the UK, but I didn't see any need.
Now I know that mail orders from India can go awry so to make sure that I had plenty, I decided to stock up. "
In the United States, it will not be available as a generic medication until 2024," but in India it's available. I got 180 for
$33 = $11 a month!
It's the very same lifesaving med made by a reputable company that commonly supplies US pharmacies, but I used a fully certified pharmacy to work around the contracts and rules. Help me out here, tho: $11 a month vs $585 a month = a
98% savings, right?
Now that I had spent $221 on a five-month supply, my next appointment was with a senior Cardiologist at the same office who tells me that I only needed to take the first 30-day supply I was given but could now go back to aspirin. Oh great. I'll see the first doc in April and I am tempted to ask why she gave me a 12-month prescription, but probably not. I don't want to piss off the gorgeous doc who has helped me so much in saving me from myself. I'll just keep in mind that she writes the scripts, but I do the shopping, and maybe I should ask more questions.
