A briefing in data

The $9,657 pill that costs $34.50.

One pharmacy in America publishes its true cost plus a fixed 15% on every drug it sells. That makes every other price in the country checkable. Scroll.

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Step one

We verified twelve by hand.

Twelve common drugs, priced at Cost Plus and against the retail figure each listing publishes — every number linked to its source, package sizes matched.

Bar length is on a square-root scale so the small multiples stay visible. "Listed retail" is Cost Plus's own published comparison — reproduced with attribution, not independently verified. The 12-drug index also carries an independent cash-floor comparator: see the data page. Captured July 7, 2026.

Step two

Then we indexed all 1,032.

Every dot is one drug on the Cost Plus list, placed by what it costs there. Blue dots have already been checked against an independent source — the hand-verified index or federal pharmacy-cost data.

Prices captured from costplusdrugs.com, July 7, 2026; log scale; excludes the flat $5 pharmacy fee and $5.25 shipping. Blue = independently benchmarked (583 of 1,032); gray = pending. Methodology.

The federal check

Then Washington's own data backed them up.

We joined the catalog to NADAC — the federal survey of what US pharmacies actually pay wholesale — matching exact strength and form, drug by drug.

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drugs benchmarked against federal acquisition-cost data (NADAC, CMS, as of —)

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independent price checks across the catalog — 583 federal + 12 hand-verified (a few drugs carry both)

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of the — drugs with clean package math sell at or below what pharmacies themselves pay wholesale (preliminary — extreme ratios held back pending row-level review)

Why the gap exists

$7.3B

is what the FTC found the three biggest pharmacy benefit managers made in six years by marking up specialty generic drugs at their own pharmacies. Read the briefing on the middlemen →

Every number above traces to a source.

Browse the full catalog yourself, or read the methodology. The real version updates weekly — built and run by Letter Leverage.

Browse all 1,032 drugs → nils@letterleverage.com