Viagra has been fairly expensive over the past 19 years.
Now the costs of drugs like Viagra for treating male erectile dysfunction are finally coming down.
Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, Monday introduced the first official generic version of its impotence pill.
The drug costs $30 to $35 per pill, about half the price of brand-name Viagra. Generic maker Teva Pharmaceuticals can also introduce its own Viagra generic beginning this week, although the company hasn’t announced whether it will.
Some of the lowest consumer prices for generic Viagra are already offered by specialized pharmacies and e-commerce startups, such as New York-based Roman Health, which has an online prescription service and mail-order pharmacy that delivers doses of Viagra’s active ingredient — sildenafil citrate — for $4 to $10.
There is currently no mainstream generic version of Cialis, a popular and longer-lasting erectile dysfunction drug, but one could hit the market as soon as September 2018.
Many health insurance plans limit the number of E.D. pills they will cover, and some don’t cover brand-name E.D. drugs at all. That means patients often pay the full price of the pills.
Viagra revolutionized the treatment of erectile dysfunction in 1998 as the first oral pill for improving erections. As many as 40 percent of men 40 and older have some E.D. issue, according to one health study, with prevalence increasing with age.
More than 13 million U.S. prescriptions were issued in 2016 for brand-name E.D. drugs, generating $3.5 billion in sales, according to health industry data firm IQVIA. Viagra was the second-most prescribed pill last year behind Cialis, which became No. 1 in 2014.
Pfizer initially sold Viagra at a wholesale price of $7 per pill, or around $8.50 to $9 a pill for consumers after pharmacy markups, according to press reports at the time. The pharmaceutical giant steadily raised Viagra’s price over the years, even as similar medications such as Cialis, Levitra and Stendra came out.
