Let's go buy some drugs!

CFI Care (not its real initials) farms out its prescription coverage to third parties, and this year's third party has done something I hadn't seen before: not only did they issue the usual list of this year's drug buys with the usual tut-tutting about ways to cut the expense, but they disclosed, not only how much I paid in copays, but how much they forked over to Sav-on. (Which sums, incidentally, are almost identical; I paid out $705.69, they paid out $705.04.)

Unwarranted conclusions I am reaching from the data provided:

• The stuff I take for my blood pressure has dropped markedly in price: it used to be $103 a month and is now $57.

• With the withdrawal of Vioxx from the market, prescription NSAIDs seem to have gone up a bit: the one I take now is up over $4 a tab. (I know these prices because under a previous third-party regime, we had to pay out the full amount at the register and then wait for a reimbursement check.)

• On the one generic drug I take regularly (it's a tranq), the flat $10 copay represents 76 percent of the retail price. On the two brand-name items above, I pay 53 and 27 percent respectively.

• However, the differences aren't always so marked: the ten bucks for a one-shot generic I had filled last year represented only 26 percent of retail.
  

The standard pitch is made for mail-order service, which they say will save me about $190 a year. (How much it saves them, they don't say.) I'm not averse to this, exactly, but I've heard just enough horror stories to stay my hand from dialing the 800 number.

Posted at 9:55 AM to General Disinterest