Jeanne Pinder
This post originally appeared on Forbes, where I am a contributor. If you’re like a lot of Americans, your prescription prices keep going up and up. What to do? Here are eight easy hacks for saving money on meds. Before the hacks though, one important point: If your insurance company won’t pay for something that is recommended by […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: Rob Lamberts, a family physician, wrote this useful piece over at his blog, “Musings of a Distractible Mind.” The money quote: “This incident is just one example of the terrible gaming that routinely occurs with the prices of drugs. There are plenty of others. Why, for example, do brand name medications continue having such […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: “Express Scripts and its rivals including CVS/Caremark and OptumRX manage prescription drug coverage for insurers and employers,” Alison Kodjak writes over on NPR. “They’re trying to spark price wars among drugmakers by refusing to pay for some brand-name medications unless they get a big discount. The result is that average costs for many drugs […]
Jeanne Pinder
Summary: “The Center for Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) at the University of Michigan reports that until 2002, most people with employer-sponsored insurance that included prescription drug coverage were in plans with one or two formulary tiers. As of last year, nearly 25% of insured people were in plans with four or five tiers, and the […]
Elizabeth Celms
(Updated 2022) Birth control pills can come at very different prices. Sometimes they’re free if covered by your insurance — but they can also be much more expensive on cash (we saw $184 for one). They can actually in some cases be more expensive if you have insurance! Covered by insurance or not, there are […]
David Voran, M.D.
Summary: We hear a lot from doctors who see the problems of the health care system from a perspective that’s often surprisingly revelatory. Occasionally, we meet someone who’s a good doctor, writer and thinker all at the same time. Dr. David Voran is one; he wrote this for us about the problems his patients encounter […]
Jeanne Pinder
Hospital markups on drugs are notoriously high. Here are some examples, from a piece by Susan Jaffe at Kaiser Health News, in collaboration with USA Today: “In Missouri, several Medicare observation patients were billed $18 for one baby aspirin, said Ruth Dockins, a senior advocate at the Southeast Missouri Area Agency on Aging. “Pearl Beras, […]
Jeanne Pinder
Drugs can be really expensive — and prices can vary widely, as a patient group found out not long ago while sharing information on Facebook.
Lisa Riordan Seville
More generic drug means cheaper drugs for thousands of patients, and savings for insurance companies. But what happens if the generic doesn’t work? We hear one patient’s story of her expensive fight to stay on the brand-name drug.
Lisa Riordan Seville
A new study found patients pay an average of $1266 a month out-of-pocket for their care, causing them to cut back on everything from trips to the movies to groceries. What does this mean for you?
