PHOENIX — With prescription drug prices rising, how would you like to pay what the pharmacy pays - the wholesale cost? Well, now you can and there are already Valley residents taking advantage of the savings.
72-year-old Bob Yarrow was recently diagnosed with AFib, an irregular heartbeat. He now has to take 12 different medications a day, which he depends on, but at what cost?
"If we're not healthy, nothing else works so, it wasn't a matter of letting this go or not letting this go. If we had to cut back on food, if we had to do something else, we would do it, but we were not going to cut back on our medications," says Bob Yarrow, ScriptCo user in Glendale.
Bob and his wife both signed up for ScriptCo, a membership-based pharmacy, serving nearly every state including Arizona. ABC15 has a breakdown of his two most expensive prescriptions with Medicare.
"The first one, for three months, would've cost me $193. The second one would've cost me, or did cost me, $57," says Yarrow.
But, Bob says he ended up paying $16.20 and $3.60 with ScriptCo.
After adding all his medications together, how much is he really saving?
"Probably close to $1,000 a month," says Yarrow.
ScriptCo claims to be the only pharmacy in America that sells medications at actual cost. They offer every generic on the market, with the exception of controlled substances.
"When you look at pharmacies in general, there's always a margin there. Whether you're operating in an insurance ecosystem or in just a cash pay model, they're marking up the cost of the medication. To our knowledge, we are the only pharmacy transparently disclosing the cost we buy it at and selling it at cost," says Zach Zeller, co-founder of ScriptCo.
ScriptCo does this by not accepting any form of insurance. Instead, there is a $140 annual membership fee, which unlocks your medication costs at zero mark-ups.
"It's not fair for someone going through cancer to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to live, right? And so, our biggest goal really is to just create that radical transparency that can completely move the marketplace and really meaningfully help people."
Co-founder Zach Zeller says the idea for ScriptCo also came about from a personal experience, the high cost of his wife's migraine medication. Now, their mission is to help others experiencing the same problem.
"There aren't many companies that have that kind of concern for people, that they're willing to go in on a very shoestring budget," says Yarrow.
To get a free quote on potential prescription savings, click here.