Health Insurance And Life Insurance

By Author: louis hammer
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Five ways to lower your prescription cost even if you do not have health insurance or your Rx coverage is limited.

Plenty of people are without health coverage and many people have tried to reduce their insurance premiums by purchasing a medical plan with reduced or even lacking prescription coverage. This has transferred some or even all of the cost of prescription medication back onto the consumer. Here are five ways to help with those costs.

The first thing to find out is weather there is a good discount card available in your area.
Some of these cards are very inexpensive or even free.
Washington State has designed a free RX plan (Washington Prescription Drug Program) that will help reduce prescription cost for everyone in that state. If you live in an alternative state check with you State Insurance Commissioner to see if you have an alternative plan. Here is what you can expect.

In Washington State you can find the following benefits.
• The program is FREE!
• The average member saves $25.34 -- or 43 percent-- per prescription
• Everyone in Washington ...
... is eligible to join
• No income restriction
• No age restriction
• All drugs are eligible for discounts
• Phone access to a pharmacist is available during regular business hours
• Large network of participating retail pharmacies statewide (500+)
• Free mail order service available
Who can benefit from the WPDP discount card?
• Washington State residents
• People who have a high-deductible health plan such as a Health Savings Account (HSA) may be able to use the WPDP discount card when paying down the deductible (check with your HSA plan for details)
• People who have no insurance coverage
• People who have medical coverage but no prescription drug benefit
• People who have prescription drug coverage through their employer, but it does not cover the drug they need

There are plenty of other ways to save on prescription cost no mater where you live.
Do your homework and be an informed consumer.
Not all pharmacies charge the same price for the same prescription. Some pharmacies have their own frequent shopper discount card. Look into licensed mail order services who allow you to buy three months at a time and will pass on the savings to you. I can not advise buying over the internet if not from well known drug store outlets. Know who you are dealing with if you use the internet as there are no safeguards. Check with laws and regulations if you buy from Canada or foreign countries. You might not be getting what you think you bought and it might be against the law.

Generic drugs cost less.
Talk to your doctor to see if there is a generic equivalent for your prescription. Many brand name drugs have equally safe effective generic alternatives. Sometimes you will need to take two different generic drugs to make up the component of one brand name drug and the price will still be lower.

Brand name drug companies can help as well.
If you qualify and are willing to fill out some income evaluating forms many pharmaceutical companies will provide discount or even give coupons for free prescriptions to low income consumers. Ask you doctor or pharmacist. Google the name of the drug company or brand name of the drug on the internet to see if they list any financial aid programs on their web pages.

Understand your drug benefit within your own insurance policy.
Insurance companies communicate better these days. They have very good booklets or sections of your policy in real English to help you take advantage of your current benefits. Locate your insurance company’s webpage. You can even call the customer service department of your plan and talk over your options.

The most important thing to learn from these sources is your insurance policy’s drug formulary system. This will tell you if your drugs are covered or not and at what level. Those that are covered can fall into three or four tiers. Each tier is paid at a different rate. The first tier has the best compensation the third and forth the least. If your drug is not on the list at all, talk to your insurance company and make an appeal to get it on. Maybe it can be covered as a special case. This sometimes happens if you can show that no alternative drug will work and that it is not experimental. It will take some homework and extra documentation from your doctor but it could be the difference from having part of it paid for by your insurance or paying for it totally on your own.

We can break down the tier system as follows.
The best tier or level one gives the most coverage with the smallest co-pay or maybe even no co-pay. This is where we find the generic drugs and a few brand name drugs. Insurance companies are trying to hold cost down by giving preferential treatment to this category. It becomes a partnership between the consumer and the insurance company. The consumer benefits through lower premiums with this design.

The next tier with a higher co-pay will include a few more brand name, patented drugs. Not all brand name drugs for the same prescription will be included in this tier. The insurance company will have done it’s market research and only listed the lowest price brands again in an effort to hold down cost but not at the expense of reduced benefits. The goal for the insurance company is to give incentives to drugs that cost less yet still do the medically necessary job for the most people.

The lowest tiers include more brand name, patented drugs the company feels the consumers are interested but do not get any discounts. They are in the formulary list so are covered but at the lowest level with the highest co-pay. The insurance company normally feels there are lower cost effective alternatives but know these are popular drugs so will at least have then on the list.

You can see there are a number of ways to try to reduce your prescription expenses. Not all will apply to each individual. One thing to keep in mind is that the market is in a flux so keep your notes from your homework and repeat the steps every once in a while as things can change.

Louis Hammer has helped people with health insurance needs for over 25 years.
Health, Long Term Care, Medicare Supplement, and Life Insurance are the main focus of his virtual insurance web site.

https://healthinsuranceandlifeinsurance.com/