Saving Consumers Time and Money on Prescription Drug Costs

Dealing with Higher Co-pay Costs

by BetterRxCard 5. February 2010 23:05

For anyone that is familiar with our EquivaMeds service over the past 3+ years, you know we quote from Kaiser Family Foundation quite a bit. I find their research and analysis on health care issues to be fair and pretty illuminating at times.

Each year they put out new research on the state of health insurance in America; how many have it or do not, where people get it from, broken down by policy type, how much you pay, co-pay, coinsurance, yadda yadda yadda.

And if you follow this and other stories out there you see co-pay costs going up each year. It started about 10 or so years ago, remember? Back then we all had three tier formularies that started at $5 or $10 and grew to maybe $30.

The something called “cost shifting” came to play and you saw those numbers go up and the difference between tiers grow wider. For our insurance this year, that means a $20 tier 1, $50 tier 2 and, gulp, $70 tier 3. Not to mention that there are more exclusions on our formulary than ever before. What’s an exclusion? Believe me, you will be hearing more and more about them going forward.

This is why we build EquivaMeds years ago, to try to find options, and why we rolled out BetterRxCard last year. But in the interest of providing a valuable resource and not just a marketing blog, I wanted to bring your attention to this article from Lisa Zamosky. It emphasizes some of the things I’ve tweeted and may have blogged on in the past, but goes beyond by talking about PAP programs and a useful web site to help get a handle on drug pricing.

Enjoy.

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Tags: lisa zamosky, kaiser family foundation, co-pays, co-pay costs, equivameds, betterrxcard, formulary

About ... Genuity Group

For years, Genuity Group has been engaged in finding new ways to save money on prescription drugs by blending technology with patients needs and doctor and pharmacist requirements. Along the way we learnd a lot! We used that knowledge to created new, innovative ways to help consumers and employers save money on prescription drugs.

In 2006, we created a new technology that would save millions of dollars off the cost of brand name drugs for self-insured employers and consumers. That technology, called EquivaMeds, is a patent-pending tool that has averaged more than $700 per year in savings for consumers nationwide – nearly four times more savings than is possible with a traditional discount drug card.

In 2009, we introduced BetterRxCard, a discount drug card program that not only provided the best discounts available for consumers when insurance wasn't an option, but it also provides a way to save on expensive brand name drugs.

Now I we're sharing some of what I've learned here. Sure, we'll talk about projects we're working on, like the BetterRxCard and EquivaMeds. But there are other ways out there to save and many other things to consider when you are in a position that you need to find the facts and make a decision. I hope we provide some of the information to help you, one of the 58% of Americans that have some form of monthly prescription drug cost, save money.

Dealing with Higher Co-pay Costs

About ... Genuity Group

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