Even if your medical insurance plan has generous prescription coverage, it may not cover brand name drugs when generics are available. And that’s perfectly understandable–unless the generics don’t happen to work for you.
Generic drugs contain the same active ingredients as the name brand after which they are fashioned, but sometimes they’re just a little, well, off. Could be personal body chemistry, could be inactive ingredients; who knows? Regardless, if you find yourself with a bottle of, say, a $5 bottle of Fluoxetine when your family really, really (really) needs you on Prozac, you could be on the hook for more than $3,300 a year. (Two months of generic Fluoxetine costs about the same as a single capsule of original Prozac.)
Some plans give you a price break if your doctor writes an appeal letter, indicating that a particular generic is ineffective, makes you sick, or whatever the case may be. Others don’t. Should you be on the hook for a drug that costs several Ben Franklins a month, you could save a few bucks by calling around to local pharmacies to see what they charge.
But there’s a more economical option that requires a bit of legwork.
Online pharmacies. Really.
We’re not talking the Canadian pharmacies that spam you with offers of cheap Viagra.
The respected National Bureau of Economic Research found in early 2012 that legitimate online pharmacies–vetted via legitscript.com and the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites–sold authentic drugs for less money than brick-and-mortar drug stores.
Of the 30 online pharmacies OK’ed by NABP, almost two-thirds are available to anyone with a valid doctor’s script. (The others were open only to members of particular insurance plans.)
Depending upon the pharmaceutical, savings vary–not only between the corner Duane Reade and CVS an avenue over, or your local pharmacies and online pharmacies, but also among the web-based drug stores themselves. A month of name-brand Prozac, for instance, runs about $260 at a city pharmacy. Prices at legitimate online pharmacies range from $292 at familymeds.com to $218 at . (Prices at pharmacies that couldn’t be verified at both the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy and Legitscript ran less.) Viagra, however, had found no difference between Duane Reade and the vetted online drug stores.
The Food and Drug Administration, while warning against illegal websites, says that legitimate online pharmacies can provide consumers with a convenient, more economical way to obtain medicines.
As with anything, buyer beware.
Hillary Chura lives in New York with her husband and their two sons.
