Amen
$300 for a life saving medication seems egregious. It’s not like insulin dependent diabetics have other options.
Co pays on glimepiride is $2. This infuriates me.
It’ll continue to be that way as long as the status quo is that the vast majority of consumers aren’t actually the ones paying for the med. those aren’t the real prices, those are the list prices, and behind the scene each payer (insurance) negotiates their own rebates with the manufacturers after paying the list price. Those rebates are confidential and considered trade secrets-- that info and those amounts are not available to the consumer. this creates a never ending upward pressure in list prices, and a secret competitive process that you and I do not benefit from. I guarantee you if it was a free market competitive process in which the end consumers were incentivized to find the best bargain and sellers were incentivized to compete for their dollars, modern analogs would be comparable to the $25/ vial that R and NPH sell for at Walmart and cvs .
This situation also creates unimaginable roadblocks to breakthroughs in pharmaceutical technology. Imagine this:
Big pharma rep: " there’s a new inhaled insulin, smart insulin, pump… whatever… that works so much better than any of our products it could easily put us out of business if it catches on… we’ll offer you, the payer, 100% rebates for absolutely all of our insulin products for 10 years as long as you do not allow any of your forced customers to obtain coverage for any of our competitors’ products"
Payer: “100% rebate!? Certainly can’t turn that down. We will make damn sure nobody benefits from these breakthroughs”
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Simply outrageous.
It is all about the strip. I will use an example of one system I am familiar with, but others will be similar.
The strip will contain an enzyme in a matrix that will eat all or part of a blood glucose sample.
You can get variability from the following sources:
How much blood goes in the strip. i.e. is every strip fill-able with the same amount of blood, variability here will lead to variability in the measurements.
Enzyme amount - is the company able to put exactly the same amount of enzyme on each strip. If your strip doesn’t consume all of the glucose in the sample, then this is really important. If you consume all of the glucose then you only need to ensure you have enough to consume it all in the time required for the measurement.
Enzyme activity - How does storage (optimal or not) affect your system output.
The meter in many of the modern systems is just a small part of the error, since it just needs to apply a voltage and measure a current. The error here, will be seen in how small a step your meter can report, i.e. does it move in 1mg/dl steps or larger ones.
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Ageee… it’s 100% in the strips. The meter itself is just an electrical measurement device and should for all practical purposes be 100% accurate itself
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@Chris, what causes one vial of strips to read systematically lower than another, if they’re the same brand? We just switched from one vial to another of Freestyle Lites. In general they’re pretty accurate but I have a hunch these ones are reading on average 10-15 mg/DL lower than the past vial.
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Tia,
If the entire vial of strips is consistently lower than your last vial, my first guess would be a difference in the amount or activity of the enzyme applied to the strip.
For those systems that seem to have difficulty reproducing a number, my guess would be they don’t have very good quality control on the size of the blood sample being applied.
Chris
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I’m circling back to this after about a month on the Contour strips (after having been on the verio one touch for about 18 months too long). Just wanted to thank you all for chiming in. Now that I’m using the Contour strips, my CGM is so much more accurate. I cannot believe the difference! I would often wake to readings that were 50+ points off with the verio. Now that I’m using the contour, I will often see readings within 1 point of my meter. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Especially you, @Eric @docslotnick! It really has been a game-changer.
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@Irish, what were you using before?
@Michel, I was using the Verio One Touch.
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That’s interesting. We are using it too right now and have just obtained a Contour – I will also report on our experience in going from one to the other.
That is what we see between the Dexcom G5 and the One Touch. Well up until about day #12 on a sensor then it all goes belly up. And often this is with only one calibration per day.
But I am going to place an order for the Contour Next strips and see if it goes through. All the responses have been so overwhelmingly positive that is would seem sorta nutz NOT to give it a whirl.
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After seeing this post originally, I ordered the contour next strips, 20.03 for 100. My insurance covers verio, but they seemed off sometimes, so wanted to do some checking, previously my insurance covered contour next, and I thought they were great.
So, I can say that most of the time, verio and contour were close and in line with dexcom and my expectations. But maybe 1 of 5 verio strips were off more than what I would expect. So decided from now on I would calibrate dexcom only from contour next.
So I decided to check AZ and found the prices are going up on the contour next.
But I think amazon has some bad practices. I selected a 300 count and lowest I found was 69.99. I checked for 'other seller’s and consistently saw even higher prices. So I completed the order. While still on line, clicked a few more times and now I see a seller with 300 for 62.99, another for 64.00. I add the 62.99 to my cart before it disappears, and make purchase. Then go back and cancel the first one. The cheaper one also had a sooner delivery date.
That’s trickery from amazon, and have reported it to them.
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The Verio was running nearly 30 points higher than my actual BG when I tested it against another meter…consistently. Now, I could have just gotten a bad version, but that seems like a huge problem when aiming for tight control.
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There are a lot of pretty weird pricing online. The variabilities in pricing could very well be demand driven.
Anyone out there with experience/knowledge about how online pricing works? Airfares are definitely variable pricing depending on day of the week, time of day, and how far advance the purchase is made.
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I use camelcamelcamel dot com to see the Amazon pricing history and get an idea of whether the current price is up or down from typical. Amazon prices fluctuate and I am cheap so I like to buy low. lol. The camels site also has alerts so if something you don’t really need it right now you can put an alert and it will email you when/if the item hits that price. Kinda cool.
To search an item on the camels site you just need the amazon unique identifier like:
B0106LF3MM
Is for Contour 300 cnt strips.
You can use that to search on Amazon also - it will pull it up. This code is always embedded in a similar format in the middle of the Amazon url. Like the link for contour on amazon is shown below but see the ID in the middle… So cut-n-paste that from the URL into the camels and you can see the price history. Some items do not have a price history on the camels site but most do.
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Thank you for sharing!
There should be no reason to pay any more than necessary, or a fair price, for an item.
It drives me nuts when the same item is sold for a lot more at the “premium” store than the regular shop.
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@Thomas
This is a powerful tool!
Is there something similar for “generic” shopping items? For example, if I were interested in purchasing a Ralph Lauren, or any other major brand, turtleneck?