Hi, everybody. Cheryl Eckerson here. Welcome to another edition of Full Measure After Hours.

Today, America's drug price disaster, why drug prices skyrocketed after the Affordable Care Act and what you can do about it.

Today's topic is such a complicated story.

I've taken many stabs of reporting on various aspects of this because it's so important

and it impacts so many people.

This week on full measure, Sunday, March 8th, I break it down as best I can talking about

why you can get better prices sometimes when you're

buying drugs if you mention good RX at the pharmacy. They're not allowed to tell you, by the way,

that there's a discount available. You have to ask them. That's a result of deals that they've cut

with insurance companies and the people they purchase their drugs from.

So next time you go to the pharmacy, if you have a pretty high copay or drug costs a lot under your

insurance, ask them what the good RX price is and they'll give it to you if it's cheaper.

It's just one of the infuriating dirty little secrets involving drug pricing, how your insurance companies and drug companies conspire to infuriating dirty little secrets involving drug pricing, how your insurance companies and drug

companies conspire to inflate prices so that they can then give you fake discounts and look

like they're saving you money when they're actually charging you more. And we can talk about

what some of the alternatives are. And if you think your insurance is saving you a ton of money

because you're just paying a $5 or a $35 copay, oh contraire, the system inflates the prices

and they want you to just look at the copay and not realize you're paying vastly higher

premiums than you should. You're paying higher taxes to cover the higher

Medicare and Medicaid costs because of this system. Here's my interview with a student of all of this,

Jack Haudley. He's a research professor emeritus with Georgetown University's

McCourt School of Public Policy. Let's see if he can clear up some of this for us.

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