Today in Useful Fucking Things That No One Tells You About: the Prescription Assistance Program (PAP) offers a discount drug card to uninsured Americans. The card is accepted at over 56,000 pharmacies nationwide, including CVS, RiteAid, Walgreens, and Safeway, and offers a discount of up to 75%.
I was fired a few years ago and was afraid I would have to give up my antidepressants, but my dad told me about the drug card. With it, I paid $30 instead of $60. Still kinda pricey, but I was able to afford them until I found a new job (and since they were for my social anxiety, I have no doubt they helped during interviews).
Share this. I’m sure there are a ton of unemployed and uninsured people who don’t know about this.
So important, definitely spread this.
That one time I wasn’t on psych meds because I couldn’t afford them.
LIFE SAVING INFORMATION, PEOPLE
I have this card! It is a good card. If you are like me and still don’t have insurance in the US despite Obamacare, you should look into getting one of these cards. :D
For people in Washington (like tinierpurplefishes, whom I reblogged it from), there’s a WA state discount card as well, which can help with non-covered drugs (of which there are usually many).
QUESTION: Can anyone explain how these discount cards work in the big picture way? I’ve been trying to figure it out for years, and I don’t get it.
Things I know:
1. There are a wide variety of prescription drug discount cards, some of which are carried by individuals and some by pharmacies, which get you significant savings on drugs not covered by insurance.
2. It’s hard to find which cards you’re eligible for, but most people are eligible for at least one, and there are a LOT.
3. Drug companies go on and on and on about needing to charge full price to recoup their research costs, AND YET. My pharmacy has a discount they can just choose to apply?
How does it work? Where does the money come from? Is someone lying? Is each discount program funded, do they pay for the privilege, wtf is going on?
My understanding is that the drug companies are the ones acting shady here. Last I heard, their profit margins tended to be in the range of 25%, which is kind of ridiculous. Basically, it’s like the phone plans with the $20/month charges that they stick on until you call and ask them to take it off, or the grocery “discount” cards where they up the price on the shelf by 20% and then give you a card to bring it back down to regular price.
“Drug companies acting shady” was my first guess, but in that case I wonder why they allow the cards at all, y’know? And why there are so many separate ones, and why one person at the pharmacy applies one and the other doesn’t. :|
At the grocery store, they’re not only getting the higher price from the few people who aren’t ‘in the club’, they’re collecting sales/marketing data and ensuring some amount of brand loyalty (“Oh, I’ll go here rather than there, I already have the card”). It’s not quite so clear here…
I suspect that they let them continue because A) they’re not very well known, and it can be kind of complicated to figure out which one to get and how to use it, so not all that many people actually use them and B) most of the people who do use them, it’s not a matter of them buying at a discount or buying at full price, it’s a matter of them buying at a discount or just not bothering with their prescription and putting up with whatever they’ve got instead.
I suppose I didn’t consider that last point because it’s true for lots of things (like, say, music piracy), but those industries never seem to realize it.
Being poorly known and little used certainly lowers the cost to the industry. I still wonder how many pharmacies somehow have and use some sort of card. I know mine does, and it’s just Safeway, nothing fancy. They have a discount card which they can apply for the one drug that isn’t covered. It isn’t covered because it’s also over-the-counter, but getting it from the pharmacy using the card is cheaper… and they always use the card.
I mean, I’m already fairly convinced that most drug prices are arbitrary, and that the cries over R&D costs are blown out of proportion in order to safeguard drug company’s profit margins. But I’m still confused about the discount cards.
…it’s basically the two-year old problem. Where does it come from? Where does it go?! :P
Most drug prices are arbitrary, like most things they’re ‘what the market will bear’. In the US drug prices are, I’m given to understand, way higher than in Europe, because there’s no incentive there to push prices down. The Insurance companies in the US essentially don’t care, because they will just pass the costs on to their customers.
In the UK at least, the NHS basically says ‘make it cheap or we won’t buy it’, and most pharmacies in the UK (for most drugs) will give you the cheapest generic available for any given item (there are certain exceptions, like medications for epilepsy where brand and associated bioavailability make a huge difference). So the prices here are much lower. Talking to an expat American about her drugs, she was paying I think $60 / month for a drug that over here, the internal NHS price is ~£1.57/monthly pack (2010 prices, because that’s when my home copy of the BNF is from). Since she lives here she now pays the NHS prescription charge, which is about £7.50 per item (for however many months it’s prescribed for), so I think that’s 3 months worth for £7.50.
Drug companies are, imho, one of the most dubious groups around – just glance at Bad Pharma for a really depressing read about how unpleasant they are… I recall listening to a long-form news piece about a company based in India that fabricated all their bioavailability data and managed to sneak past various regulatory bodies all over the world with products that were of such poor quality that they wouldn’t actually work.
But that’s a whole ‘nother area :)
