Prescription medicine price is on a significant rise and one of the most rampant reasons for rising healthcare cost worldwide. To understand how prescription drugs work let us step back to understand the value chain from drug research to making it available to the masses.

Drug research is a long and costly process. Once the drug is approved (which may take up to 20 years), the drug is available in the market for masses. Except for OTC (over the counter) drugs, all other medications need a certified doctor’s prescription to buy. The pharmaceutical companies use drug distributors to supply these drugs to various pharmacies (CVS, Walgreens, Walmart) across the countries, and the pharmacy sells the drugs to end customers based on the approval from the insurance companies (customer participates are part of different insurance providers). The insurance company, in turn, uses PBM (Pharmacy Benefits Manager) to process the pharmacy purchase…