The next time you go to the drugs store you might be in for sticker shock. This investigation  has learned drug companies have quietly raised the price on 100 of medications. Our senior investigative reporter. Bob Siegel explains which drugs are impacted, why this is all happening, and what you can do to keep your prescription cost down. 

For Maria Miller, those little white pills in the palm of her hand, they're a big deal. They're for her teenage son Nick to control his epileptic seizures. It's life-saving. There's nothing else you can say. These are lifesaving medications that allow my son to function and live. Nick's medication is called Avium and it comes at quite a cost. The average retail price nearly 2300 dollars a month, 500 and 40 dollars a month after insurance. That's what Maria pays out of pocket and she's about to pay even more. This drug is already so expensive. How could they even she just learned the company that makes Actium increase the price by about five percent. That's the third price hike in just two years. I'm furious. We are literally held hostage and they're using my son's health to hold this hostage. I don't understand how this. 

Drug manufacturers raise the price of 100 of drugs, most of them expensive brand drugs. Tori Marsh is the research director at Good RX and she's been tracking the rising price of drugs for years. She says this January was the worst on record. It's not unusual to see these increases. We saw the largest amount this year. We saw over 800 drugs increase in price by an average of 4.6 percent. That includes some of the most popular prescriptions on the market, diabetes drug Genuviia, biscolic to treat high blood pressure, and Eloquist to prevent blood clos. All of them jumped about five or six percent in January. We're talking about each drug's list price and realistically few people pay the full list price due to discounts and negotiated rates, but. The annual price hikes almost always trickle down to consumers costing families 100's, sometimes thousands of dollars each year.

It's heartbreaking to see some of the patients that can't afford their medication. We run into that on a daily basis. Julie Ara is a pharmacist who owns Blue River Pharmacy in Brownsburg. The In Your Copay still 400 and 51 dollars, she says most consumers don't even know their prescription costs increased in January because of high deductibles and out-ofpocket costs at the beginning of the year. And she says, because drug companies don't really want customers to know the prices of their drugs when somebody gets a prescription, they just really have no idea about how much it's go to cost. The US doesn't really require drug companies to be transparent. 

To find out why drug price has continued to rise. Year after year we have  reached out to Pharma, an industry trade group that represents drug makers. The organization did not respond to our questions. Neither did Sinnoviian, the drug maker that raised the price of nick's medication 15 percent over the past few years. There needs to be transparency as to how and why these prices increase. Drug prices are higher over time. 

Not always because of innovation. Dr. Inman Hernandez helps run the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research shows it's not research and development that's to blame for increased costs of prescriptions. It's usually just the annual price hikes. The fact that. 
A drug is ten percent higher in cost or in price than last year. It doesn't mean that is ten percent more effective. It just means that because. 
Payers are willing to pay for them that they keep increasing the prices. And she says, because Congress does not regulate the pharmaceutical market the way other countries do US, consumers are often left with few options when it comes to big price hikes on drugs they can't live without, so are consumers just stuck?

Consumers aren't stuck, they might have to shop around. You know what a lot of people don't know is that insurance isn't the best option for many of these drugs. Insurance just isn't covering what it used to. On top of that, pharmaceutical prices can vary. Pharmacy to pharmacy. Shopping around to compare prices is very important, but there are also other things you can do. Ask your pharmacist if there's a generic version that's less expensive, look for online coupons or discount programs directly from drug makerss, and double check with your doctor if you truly need the medication or if there might be a good alternative that costs less. With the cost of prescriptions rising, it pays to shop around

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