The most common question asked today is “What prescription drug card should I choose?”  We suggest a more useful question to ask is this:

“What is the best combination of a discount drug card and pharmaceutical company-sponsored benefits plan that saves me the most money on my medications?”

Here is a true story of how much money one person saved by first understanding the right question to ask:

Don’s mother is 80 years old and lives alone in Arizona.  For years, she had sent her children and grandchildren $100 every year on their birthday.  One year, her family noticed that the checks were getting smaller - $50, then $25, then $15.  Don flew to Arizona to see if there was something “wrong”.  He found out that in the past year, she had been spending $900 a month on prescription drugs with a monthly income of $1300.  So Don immediately researched the various options.  He compared prices of online discount pharmacies with prices of specific Medicare drug plans.  But he didn’t stop there.  Using BenefitsCheckUp, he found out that all the big drug companies had special subsidies for those under a certain income.  But not all the drug companies’ subsidies were available on every discount drug card.  So he began to search out the drug card that also had the best subsidies for the particular medications that his mother was taking.  The outcome – his mother’s monthly expenses on prescription drugs dropped to $75, a savings of $825 per month or a savings of over 92%.