Yachting with Mr. Big

Dear Mr. Big Pharma CEO,

I hope you’re having a wonderful time on our yacht. I do feel like I own part of it. I’ve got glaucoma and I’ve spent nine years treating it with your high-priced medicine. I’ve never complained though. It prevents blindness and we do have that yacht.

But one day when I picked up my eye drops, I was handed a bill for $240. This was slightly more than the $40 copay I’d been paying. I immediately began to have chest pains and labored breathing, which are not typical symptoms of glaucoma.

Turns out my new insurance company thinks you charge too much for your medicine and they won’t cover it no matter how much I pay for my health insurance, which by the way, is a lot. I guess it’s only fair insurance CEOs have yachts too.

I had three choices: I could go blind. I could drop my health insurance so I’d have enough money to pay for my medicine. Or I could move to Turkey.

People in other countries pay far less for brand name medicines than Americans do and Turkey has the best deal of all. I read that we pay 679% more than Turkish citizens pay for the same medicines. If I move there, I could pay for my eye drops and still have money for moving expenses and language lessons.

Thus begun a four-month saga between me, my eye doctor, my pharmacist and my insurance company. There were many letters, phone calls and family discussions about moving to Turkey.

If that weren’t bad enough, I began experiencing new side effects of my medicine, including anxiety, insomnia and a ka-ching sound every time I used my drops.

Everything changed the day I discovered a generic version of your medicine. It costs $130 which still seems like a lot for a 25-day supply. But my insurance company helps, leaving me to pay $25 and allaying my fears of becoming a prescription drug refugee in a foreign land.

I haven’t used it long enough to know if it works as well as your liquid gold version, but I do know the side effects aren’t as severe. I haven’t heard a single ka-ching since I started using it.

So, this is goodbye Mr. Big. Living on a budget as you do, I’m sure you understand why I’m going with the generic. I do hope you can swing your yacht payments on your own.

Before I sign off, I have a suggestion. You may not realize this, but sticker shock is the main reason so many people who take life-saving medicines go ahead and die anyway. Please consider the following cost-cutting measures in your company. You could pass the savings on to your customers and singlehandedly prevent a mass migration to Turkey.

For one thing, you could take a tiny pay cut, with tiny being a relative term. Have your accountant run the numbers, but I think even if you reduced your $24 million salary by a couple million, you’d still be able to afford yacht fuel without selling your condo in the Caymans.

And think how much you’d save if you stopped making political donations. Politicians would miss them at first, but I think in the end they’d appreciate no longer being in that awkward position where they denounce drug prices out of one side of their mouth and thank you for the hefty contributions out of the other.

You could also cut back on TV advertising. We’d all miss those clever commercials where people play volleyball and go dancing despite psoriasis and irritable bowel syndrome, but I think we could get used to it if meant we’d make lower yacht payments.

Just something to think about, Mr. Big. I don’t want to say goodbye without thanking you for all you do. It must be gratifying to be part of manufacturing miracle medicines even if pharmaceutical CEOs and people in Turkey are the only ones who can afford them.