Recently, my health insurance changed and I now get my prescriptions via a firm called Express Scripts. But on the advice of my local pharmacist, I also signed up for three prescription discount services that anyone can sign up for — GoodRX, Kroger RX Savings and SingleCare. On all four sites, you can enter the name of a medication you take and the dosage and it'll tell you where you can get it and what the price will be. The discounters are not insurance companies but they sometimes are cheaper.
Maybe you already knew this but I was amazed at the price variance. There's one medication I take which is $1371.70 from Kroger RX Savings, $1391.00 from SingleCare, $1306 from GoodRX…and with my Express Scripts insurance, it's $50. (These and all numbers I'm quoting here are for a 90-day supply.)
Okay, so Express Scripts is way cheaper, right? Not always. There's another medicine I take which is $71.87 at Express Scripts, $12.00 from Kroger, $19.27 from SingleCare and then GoodRX gives me a wide range of pricing depending on where I pick it up…
The lowest is Safeway Markets where it's $4.15 and that would be great except that the nearest Safeway with a pharmacy is 302 miles from me. Next lowest would be either a Von's Market (6 miles from me), a Pavilions Market (2.4) or an Albertson's Market (5.6), all of which will give me those pills for $9.43. The odd thing about this is that Von's, Pavilions and Albertson's are all owned by the same company that owns Safeway.
Express Scripts also wants $725 for a prescription that is $9.19 from Kroger, $15.72 from SingleCare and $12.74 at Safeway, Von's, Pavilions and Albertson's. Express Scripts is way cheaper on almost everything else I take but when it isn't, it really isn't.
The pharmacist who told me about these discount cards — and there are apparently others — also told me he'd been quietly applying some of them to some of my prescriptions to lower the prices I pay. He can do this with certain discounters even if I don't sign up for them. He suggested I look at some of my recent pharmacy bills and see if any of the prices I'd paid could be lowered by applying the right cards.
I went home and found that one recent prescription filled at his pharmacy (not by him) could have been $14.00 cheaper if a different discount had been applied. When I went back and showed them, the pharmacist on duty apologized and issued me a refund for $14.00. Maybe some or most of you have known this about this kind of thing all along but it was news to me, not to be confused with newsfromme.