Before you fill a prescription, check its price on a free discount-card app and ask the pharmacist to run your insurance price too. The card price is sometimes lower than your copay and often differs between nearby pharmacies. Pay the lower one, unless you’ll likely reach your deductible this year, since card purchases usually don’t count toward it.
A prescription rarely feels like something you shop for. You hand over your insurance card and pay whatever the register says.
Yet the same pills can cost far more at one pharmacy than at another nearby. A 2017 American Journal of Managed Care study priced the generic antibiotic levofloxacin at 528 Los Angeles County pharmacies. Leaving a random pharmacy for the cheapest in its zip code would have saved $52 per prescription on average.
Your copay is only one of the prices at that counter. The pharmacy has its own cash price, and a free discount card such as GoodRx has another. For atorvastatin, the generic form of the cholesterol drug Lipitor, GoodRx lists an average retail price of about $69 for the most common version and a card price of about $8 at the cheapest pharmacy.
When the card price is below your copay, use it instead of your insurance, but check your deductible first. The comparison matters most on a high-deductible plan, where you can pay a prescription’s full cost until you meet the deductible. A card purchase bypasses your insurance, so it doesn’t count toward that deductible unless you submit the receipt and your plan credits it. On an expensive drug, or in a year you’ll reach the deductible anyway, filling through insurance can cost more at the counter but less over the year.
Asking for both prices is normal. Two federal laws signed in 2018 banned the contract clauses that kept pharmacists from telling you a cash price was cheaper, though neither law requires them to bring it up. So ask. Before each fill:
- Compare the pharmacies near you on a free discount-card app.
- At the counter, ask the pharmacist to run your insurance price and the card price.
- Ask whether a generic exists.
- Ask whether a 90-day supply costs less per pill.
- For a brand-name drug, check the manufacturer’s website for a savings or patient assistance program.
Run the comparison on each recurring prescription now and whenever your plan changes. On a drug you take every month, the cheaper price repeats at every refill.
Editorial & Advertiser Disclosure: The editorial content on this page is not provided, commissioned, reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any advertiser. Opinions expressed here are ours alone, not those of any advertiser. The offers that appear on this site are from companies that compensate us. That compensation may influence which products we cover and where and how they appear on a page – including the order in which they appear – but it does not influence our evaluations, ratings, or opinions. We do not include every company or offer available in the marketplace.
Related:
