Earlier this year, my family switched to an HSA Health Insurance plan. Unfortunately, I found out after we switched that we’d no longer pay a low $10 or $20 copay for our prescription meds. Instead, we paid upwards of $100 for each of my two boys’ ADHD meds each month.
We suffered through these costs for a few months until one evening, Mr. ThreeYear saw an advertisement for the GoodRX app on TV. “You should look into it,” he prodded me, for maybe the tenth time. “Okay, fine, I’ll download it, but it’s not going to save us anything,” I said. I was convinced that there was no way there could be much of a price differential between our meds, because I’d looked online at our health insurance’s price comparer, and thought I’d found the cheapest pharmacy.
Well, it turns out that I was in for a delightful surprise. In a strange twist of fate that has only happened a couple of times in our marriage (ha), Mr. ThreeYear was right and I was wrong.
I downloaded GoodRx and found out that the local Publix Pharmacy carried our meds for less than HALF the cost. Instead of Little ThreeYear’s meds costing over $150, they now cost $58. I was floored! How could they be so much cheaper? I had our prescriptions transferred and went to the pharmacy, and not only were the medicines cheaper, the service was much better and the pharmacy techs were more knowledgable.
A few weeks later, when we needed antibiotics for strep throat, all four of our prescriptions were $0 at Publix! (That $0 is to be read as “no additional cost” since my father, who abhors the term “free,” occasionally reads this blog).
If Mr. ThreeYear hadn’t pressed me to look into the cheaper option, I would have kept paying more and going to a worse pharmacy, probably for years.
When we got Lucy the dog, I began calling around to find out vet prices. All of the vets I called cost about the same, and charged around $400-$600 to spay young puppies. I dutifully took Lucy to her first check up at the vet, and paid $150 or so. Then, a friend came into town and I mentioned the high cost of a spay to her, and she recommended looking for a Humane Society close by where she thought they’d offer services for cheaper.
Continue reading “Paying Too Much? How to Unstick Your Money Habits”
