Terry Gilbert estimates he spends about $70 a month on prescription drugs.
The problem is he's on a fixed income and he says there have been months where he's been forced to choose between his prescribed medicine and his household bills.
"I just had other bills to be paid so when I'd run out of particular prescriptions, they'd have to wait for a couple of weeks before I had some more money," Mr Gilbert says.
In fact when it comes to prescriptions, the Grattan Institute says 1 out of every 10 people in this country often don't take the medicines prescribed to them by their doctors because of those costs.
A new report has found that the government's price disclosure program, aimed at lowering some of the costs, doesn't go far enough.
“What we found is that the price Australia is paying for prescription drugs is way, way too high,” Peter Breadon from the Grattan Institute told SBS.
The report points out that the government just lowered the wholesale price it pays for seven popular prescription medicines.
That includes Atorvastatin - a cholesterol lowering medication commonly known as Lipitor - it fell from $40 to about $20.
But the Grattan Institute says the wholesale price for that same drug in the UK is just $2.84. In New Zealand the price is about $2.
"If the price of seven drugs can come down by one third, which is what happened on average, and we're still paying 16 times the lowest prices in New Zealand, Canada and the UK, then something is seriously wrong."
The federal health minister Peter Dutton defended the government's policy.
In a statement to SBS the minister said: "The existing price disclosure process has led to significant price reductions for medicines in Australia ranging from 10 to 87 per cent. In New Zealand patients don't get the range or quick access to medicines that Australians get, so we need to be careful about comparisons.”
