Follow-Up: Saving Money on Prescription Drugs - Little Known Tricks

Last evening, ABC News presented a follow-up to the subject my last posting regarding the use of comparison-shopping to find the best bargains on prescription drugs.  That's right...the cost of prescription drugs are not etched in market stone as many of us would believe.  Just like any other consumption goods, the prices of prescription drugs varies, according to where you buy them, and the policies of the seller.  Watch the video below to find out how to shop around for the best drug prices...

Saving Money on Prescription Drugs - Little Known Tricks

One of the most positive results of being a news and information junkie is that I am constantly learning, especially about issues related to personal finance and economics. Monday, I was watching a segment from ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which spotlighted a family struggling with paying health care costs—particularly the cost of prescription drugs—in light of their unique circumstances. Although their circumstances are unique, the Florida family spotlighted in the piece represent the nearly 50% of Americans who need some form of prescription drugs (according to figures of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
However, the family in the news segment was lucky in one respect; ABC brought in a noted health care advocate and author, Michelle Katz, to help show them ways in which they might trim down the cost of prescription drugs. Watching the piece, I was slightly taken aback by some of the little-known ways which you and I as consumers can advocate on our own behalves in saving money on prescription drugs (see video below).

There are many websites dedicated to informing the public about ways to cut costs related to health care for the consumer. As an example, start here: www.facebook.com/healthcareforless. Other places to begin searching online for ways to lower costs is to check out sites which focus on particular afflictions, such as Multiple Sclerosis or other blogs. In addition,the tips offered by Katz include:

1. Check your bill, like you would at a restaurant. 

Believe it or not, there are codes for your drugs, and billing departments often get them wrong. In helping the family, Katz found one of those wrong codes on their bill. The family was being charged for a higher priced drug. Fixing the code immediately saved them $1,200. 

2. Arm yourself with the Low RX App. 

Drug prices fluctuate like gas prices. This app tells you what the average cost is for a particular drug and its generic, and arms you with the phone numbers of every pharmacy in your area. You can call other pharmacies to comparison shop. The app also shows discounts. In some cases, you can get up to 75% off.

3. Go to big wholesalers, even if you’re not a member. 

The Low RX app revealed lower drug prices at Costco, which as it turned out, by law you can buy your prescription drugs there...even if you weren’t a member. Katz found the family's drugs at Costco for $100 less than elsewhere. 

4. Negotiate. 

If you go to smaller mom-and-pop pharmacies, you can wheel and deal to bring the price down. Bringing cash can increase your bargaining power. Instead of paying $30 for a prescription at a local pharmacy, the Florida family secured the same prescription for $12 – an $18 savings. 

5. You can go directly to the big drug companies. 

Katz called and emailed large drug companies on behalf of the Florida family. She kept at it for weeks, providing proof of the family’s financial situation and even suggested that the family might have to stop buying its particular drug altogether. 

6. Visit Needymeds.com. 

Needymeds is a nonprofit group that offers grants, vouchers and patient assistance through its website. 

7. Use an RX Access discount card. 

Together Rx Access offers savings on brand-name and generic prescription products to individuals and families without prescription drug coverage, according to its website. With the help of Michelle Katz, the Florida family in the ABC News segment lowered their monthly prescription drug bill from $20,000.19 to $1,252.28, saving them $18,747.91. 

If you're one of the nearly 50% of Americans who find themselves in need of prescription drugs, these tips should be a great starting point to lower drug costs.  I've already uploaded the Low RX App to my tablet, and it works like a charm.  And I hope to check out the other sites myself when (or if) I ever need them.
Learning is a good thing!

Healthy Eating & Long Term Savings!

If you’re a regular reader to Beyond Dollars & Sense, then you know that this blog is about personal finance and money-saving tips. So as you read this posting, you might be asking yourself what does healthy eating have to do with saving money? Well, the answer’s rather obvious; eating better saves trips to the doctor’s office. It also limits the incidence of ailments we might attribute to “aging” instead of where many of the physical debilitations we experience come from as we get older…our diets. I got the idea for this peace, not from my own healthy-inspired diet, but from deleting old programs from my DVR. One of these programs was a piece from a PBS (Public Broadcasting Network) offering airing sometime last year called “The Blood Sugar Solution with Dr. Mark Hyman.” Something about the title made me decide to watch it before deleting it from my cable box.

 As I watched it, I realized that many of the health suggestions he had offered as an alternative to the high sugar diets we are accustomed to here in America—responsible for many of our obesity epidemic—I had already been enacting in my personal life. I find that I have much more energy for my workouts, as well as just feeling better knowing that I am not clogging my arteries up with MacBurgers and/or candy.
What I decided to do was to transcribe the words and thoughts of Dr. Hyman’s suggestions during this program as I re-watched the more relevant segments of his PBS special. The crux of Hyman's thesis is that the American addiction to sugar--the processed bran--is the source of many health issues we experiences. He puts forth a new ethos of thinking insomuch as personal health and eating practices.
My personal suggestion is that enacting these practices in your personal life can’t hurt; you will definitely feel better, healthier. And it’s a sure bet that you will indeed save money in potential visits to the doctor’s office.

Check your insulin, not just your blood sugar (insulin is the fat-storage hormone). Check your cholesterol (ask for the NMR test, a newer more accurate cholesterol testing available). Learn to eat your medicine.
Food is the best medicine, I don’t just preach it, I live it.

In addition, Dr. Hyman's "Blood Sugar Solution" serves up some absolute starters one needs in order to kick-start a healthy diet (and potential heath care savings).

Dr. Hyman's 10 rules for eating healthy for life.

1. Don’t eat foods with a label. Avoid foods in a box, package, or can.

2. If a food has a label, it should have fewer than 5 ingredients. Beware of food with health claims on the label. They are usually bad for you (usually, not always. Use clear judgment on this one; the label of ingredients should be the deciding factor).

3. Stay away from those deadly white powers (sugar, flour, etc. As any good nutritionist worth their title will tell you, bleached foods are not overly healthy for you). They function like sugar in the human body.

4. Throw out any food with “high fructose corn syrup” on the label. This is the main ingredient in what Dr. Hyman calls, “liquid calories” (the calories we ingest should not have their source in liquids because they are usually sugar-based. This is the number one cause of obesity in America). Don’t drink your calories. They will pour on the pounds.

5. Throw out any food with the word hydrogenated on the label (an indicator of trans-fats).

6. Throw out or do not use any highly-refined oils such as corn or soy oils. And avoid any fried foods. Instead, use olive oil (my personal favorite) and/or coconut oil.

7. An old standard…avoid any foods with ingredients that you either cannot pronounce or no not recognize. They are usually chocked full of chemicals.

8. Another old standard (that people seem to forget)…avoid foods with preservatives, additives, colorings, dyes, or “natural” flavorings such as “MSG (Monosodium Glutamate).

9. Avoid foods with artificial sweeteners of any kind (they make you hungrier, as well as slow down the metabolism). Not a great strategy for weight loss; even I knew this one (ever notice how people who drink “diet” sodas tend to purchase or drink more of them?).

10. Try to stick to plant-based foods. One tip to remember: shop around the perimeter of a supermarket. This is where most of the more natural (i.e., “real foods”) are located. The aisles tend to be the location of processed foods.

Dr. Hyman suggest that we have plenty of other healthy eating options (since, after reading the list you no-doubt think there is hardly anything else left to eat). He suggest that natural sources of carbohydrates such as vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts (where I also get sources of protein, along with tofu), while grains, or beans. He also suggest eating foods with more natural (a relative term to be sure with a non-meat-eater like myself) sources of proteins such as (again) beans, nuts, lean chicken, and fish (with the latter, do your research to make sure it’s not a species of fish prone to retaining man-made substances found in water such as mercury. My personal favorite is salmon, which as high in Omega 3’s “good fats”).
Finally, he says that that we are consider foods that contain “slow carbohydrates,” sources of natural energy that rise slowly in the human body, not cause metabolic “spikes” such as processed sugars. These include brown rice, quinoa, and sweet potatoes.

 Watching this special again, I picked up something else that’s a potential money-saver; the timing of when we eat. When we eat in the mornings, we are less likely to eat heavy meals during the day (I myself am guilty of the opposite. I only just started eating in the mornings during the last 2 weeks…and I find myself more able to resists buying snacks, even healthy ones, later in the day…a known budget-buster). Eating later or at night forces our bodies to store calories instead of burning them—one of the reasons I sandwich my workouts both just as I wake up and just before I head to sleep.
Eating healthy in one of those areas in life where we don’t think to consider how it can save us money. But in pretty much the same way that something as simple as deleting old television programs can lead to inspired thinking, eating healthy can lead to bigger deals, and bigger long-term savings in a time where health care costs are rising…and where it becomes fiscally necessary to save a buck where we can, any way we can.

Taming Those Medical Bills

So I’m watching CBS Saturday Morning this morning, and a very interesting segment aired. The segment spotlighted a way in which to save money on the many medical billing mistakes that are apparently found when we pay for medical procedures. As I watched this segment, I began to think about aspects of the current health care regime in America.
When it comes to socio-political human behavior, two related questions have always plagued me: Why do people do things which they know will adversely affect their health, and how is it that in a nation where upwards of 2 million people a year declare medical bill-related bankruptcy how some people can be so against universally affordable health care insurance? In fact, one of the things that I’ve always personally campaigned for in my writings is the necessity for universally affordable health care insurance. Slam the notion as “socialism,” “health-care rationing,” or whatever narrow ideologically-driven level of thinking you want…the wallets of many Americans will be comforted by this notion.
But next to the pipe dream of totally free health care, the next best thing in helping us pay our medical bills is the reality that there are apparently businesses in America which help customers interested in their services find many of the overcharges which between 40-80 percent of all medical bills contain ("How to Fight a Bogus Bill"). In addition to watching the video segment from this morning’s segment of CBS Saturday Morning,

I have taken the liberty of posting—in addition to some of the advice that I’ve received—other colorful options for helping Consumers curtail high medical bills.

- Despite the reality that you have other financial responsibilities—housing, utilities, food, childcare, etc.—every effort should be made to pay medical bills. Because bill collectors have become so much more aggressive in attempting to collect owed debt (see: "Debtor's Prison 2.0" for example), ignoring this responsibility will not make it or the consequences go away.

- Paying off large portions of a medical bill (or the bill in its entirety) could be even more beneficial to you beyond the obvious. Many doctors, clinics, and hospitals will generally offer a 20-30% off medical bills if you can pay them off in a shorter period of time, so by all means seek to negotiate (to help accomplish paying off my own medical bills, I was lead to a third party company, like Access One, which I took advantage of by doubling and sometimes tripling the payments in order to erase my payment obligations 2 years before the 36 month projected payoff date).

- On the point of negotiating bills (the basis of the video which spurred this particular posting), many times you can talk directly with your hospital billing department, doctor's office or medical clinic to gain more favorable payment options (my sister once negotiated with a dentist office to have her medical bill cut by $600; she was paying in cash for services). The fact that doctors and hospitals don’t want to send any unpaid debt to collections—only to potentially collect at a loss 80 cents or less on the dollar—operates in your favor with any negotiation efforts.

- On the point of negotiating bills (the basis of the video which spurred this particular posting), many times you can talk directly with your hospital billing department, doctor's office or medical clinic to gain more favorable payment options (my sister once negotiated with a dentist office to have her medical bill cut by $600; she was paying in cash for services). The fact that doctors and hospitals don’t want to send any unpaid debt to collections—only to potentially collect at a loss 80 cents or less on the dollar—operates in your favor with any negotiation efforts.

- Knowing full well that some proud individuals may avoid this next suggestion like the plague, consider the assistance of state and/or federal government-based programs to help defray or even pay your medical debt/bills. Both Medicaid and Medicare programs, dependent upon the circumstances, could be a literal life-saver in helping to address medical costs. The eligibility requirements for Medicaid varies state-by-state, but generally provides complete coverage
for low-income families (in addition to income, eligibility factors include age, pregnancy status, disability status, income, citizenship, and assets). Medicare (also based on certain requirements) is for individuals above 65 or for young individuals who are disabled. In addition, each state has a State Children Health Insurance Plans (SCHIP) which offers subsidized health insurance for children who don’t otherwise qualify for Medicaid.

- Every hospital has a financial aid or charity department (required by law for those who want to retain or are seeking non-profit tax status). These departments can be a helpful source in helping particularly hard-luck cases. There are also plenty of other non-profit organizations that provide help with medical bills. In either case, like with government programs, you need to meet certain requirements to qualify for financial assistance.


To summarize, if you can make small payments, the reality is that each option has its advantages and disadvantages. If you can make any kind of consistent payments, self-negotiation or working with a medical debt reduction specialist (i.e., outside/third-party negotiators) are your best options. If you cannot make a payment, government programs, charities and financial aid departments should be contacted.