For Individuals

If you want to see how crazy drug prices variations can get, try calling different pharmacies and asking their price for the same drug. The pharmacy team at Good Shepherd Pharmacy in Memphis Tennessee did just that and the results were eye opening. They picked eleven common generic drugs and looked up what it would cost for a 90 day supply on the website GoodRx.com which provides coupons for discounts that can be filled at various pharmacies. Then they compared the Good Rx.  (www.goodrx.org) coupon prices to the cash prices for the same medications at Walgreens, Kroger, Walmart, Publix, and Costco.

The price variation was astonishing. Walgreens sold the acid reflux drug Pantoprazole 40mg. for $305.89 for a 90 day supply. Kroger had the lowest cash price for the same drug among the pharmacies at $90.99. In contrast to all of these pharmacies’ cash prices,  the Good Rx coupon  downloadable  from the Good Rx website would enable you to buy the same drug at any of these pharmacies for  only $13.77 instead.

Walgreens wanted $737.89 for a 90 day supply of the cholesterol drug  Atorvastatin 40 mg.    Costco had it for $29.53 and the Good Rx  coupon price was again much less than either at  $15.27. 

Bear in mind that if you use a Good Rx coupon,  what you spend will not contribute to your insurance plan’s annual deductible because you would not be running the payment through your insurance plan.  

If you are uninsured or on a high deductible insurance plan, you may also want to check out the membership plan offered by Good Shepherd Pharmacy (https://ChurchHealth.org). Members pay about $5 per month for a 90 day supply of any of the 350 generic drugs that the pharmacy keeps in stock. For uninsured patients, Good Shepherd can get special pricing on brand name and specialty drugs by working with international pharmacies and manufacturers assistance programs. Brand name drugs and insulin are priced at $25 monthly for patients with low income who qualify. If these  fees are still too high for your budget, uninsured patients may qualify for additional financial assistance from Good Shepherd Pharmacy.

You can also apply yourself directly for financial aid from drug manufacturers, who commonly advertise such assistance.  

If you cannot afford  a drug that you need, some healthcare and drug pricing experts such as Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal M. D. recommend that you  consider buying it outside the U.S.as the cost overseas  is likely to be from one third to one half the price here. An estimated five million people currently order medicines abroad, including  doctors. If you are traveling to a country whose health system you trust, you may wish to consider buying refills of medications there. Pharmacists worldwide often honor such requests because they have independent prescribing ability themselves. It helps to carry a prescription with you as a foreign pharmacist may want to confirm that you are taking the medicine at the advice of a doctor.  

You may save enough on the price difference to pay in substantial part for your overseas airfare. For example, the manufacturer’s recommended wholesale price for Advair, a popular asthma inhaler, was $250 in the U. S. but $45 if you paid cash in Paris. You may even find that the medicine you seek is being sold over the counter with no prescription needed overseas. Voltaren Gel, a nonsteroidal anti inflammatory topical lotion, costs over $50 and requires a prescription here, but in Europe it is sold over the counter for under $10.

Importing  drugs prescribed by your doctor  into the U.S. is technically illegal, but healthcare experts such as Dr. Rosenthal advise that the government has historically turned a blind eye to the practice so long as the supply ordered is for three months or less and comes in a small package.

If you do choose to use overseas mail order pharmacies, you could visit  websites such as www.PharmacyChecker.com to ensure that the medicines you are ordering are not fakes.  According to Dr. Rosenthal, this website was started by a physician and it vets the pharmacies both here and abroad that are listed on that Internet site to check that they sell high quality drugs  with  packaging instructions and warning labels are in clear English.