Liquid Gold

Developed some sort of a nasty eye infection this week. The good folks at ACMC Urgent Care took good care of me. Not sure what it was invaded just one eye, but am taking some interesting medicine.

The antibiotic is a generic medicine that goes in each eye 2 drops at a time every four hours. After insurance the cost for those drops was about $4.00. The other medicine (no generic available) is something called Patanol that is designed to keep my eye from getting "itchy." The cost for the anti-itch eye drop before insurance was just over $100 for a 5 ML bottle of the stuff.

I'm ok that we consumers pay the price for research and development of these medications. That's how this works so that science and business can march forward.

Got me to thinking though what the price of this Patanol might be per gallon. The price of gasoline has most everyone conscious of the price per gallon. My basic math tells me that there are 200 5 ML bottles in a litre. Panatol then goes for about $20,000 per litre. From there, we know that there are approximately 3.78 litres in a gallon. That takes the anti-itch meds to over $75,000 per gallon. And for a barrel of the stuff? Don't get me started! It just makes my eyes itchy.