The average American will part with about $1,200 every year to get their hands on the prescriptions they need. If you’re looking at how much money you have leftover at the end of each month and are thinking that forking over $100 to pharmacies on top of your other expenses seems like more than you can bear, you’re not alone.
Prescription drug prices are among the most talked about and often bipartisan issues in American politics today. While officials work to find resolution on that topic, today, there are pathways you can take to find discount prescription drugs and ultimately lower the annual burden drugs have on your life.
Curious to learn more? If you are, keep reading to take in a handful of strategies that could change everything!
1. Work With Your Insurer
Health insurance in the United States is more accessible than ever, with a variety of plans available to help keep your health insurance costs in check. By heading over to healthcare.gov during enrollment periods, you can gain access to low-cost prescription drug plans that will help safeguard your savings as you try to manage your medical issues.
For people that are in deep poverty, several plans offered through healthcare.gov are completely free!
To learn more, you can head over to the website, or, if you have an insurance plan presently and are hoping to gain better access to discount prescription drugs through it, give that plan a call and see what they’d suggest.
2. Go With Off-Brands
A simple way to lower your drug costs is to opt out of name-brand prescriptions.
Most doctors are proactive in advising that you stick with off-brand medication. If yours isn’t, request the generic version of the drug you’re being prescribed explicitly. If you remain steadfast in your wanting the cheaper variation of your drug, your doctor should oblige.
Note that in rare cases people have had reactions to off-brands of drugs while being okay taking original versions. If you have preexisting medical conditions that could heighten your risk of experiencing similar reactions, discuss them with your doctor.
3. Explore Importing
Thousands of people import medications from international drug suppliers, particularly Canadian suppliers like Maple Leaf Meds, to get drugs at Canadian prices. Canada negotiates drug rates with manufacturers which allows their citizens lower-cost access to medication than those same medications would cost in the USA.
As the US works to weigh the consequences of resolving that discrepancy, you can enjoy Canadian discounts by having a prescription from your local doctor and using it to put in a drug order online!
There are legal considerations to ordering drugs abroad that you’ll want to get advice from your doctor on before partaking in importing.
4. Use Discount Applications
In the digital age, there’s an app for everything. That holds true for sourcing discount drug prices.
Applications like GoodRx feature thousands of manufacturer and store coupons that enable you to drop the price of over-the-counter medications immediately. Best of all, these discounts are available to users in GoodRx and similar apps at no cost.
Download a good pharmaceutical discount app today to see how much you might be able to save on medication. Your app may even be able to get you better rates than your insurance offers.
5. Keep an Eye Out for Coupons via Your Pharmacy
If you pick up your prescriptions from Walgreens, CVS, or other national chains, many times those providers offer coupons. Coupons could be for free delivery, a percentage off your order, or any number of other things.
To gain access to pharmacy coupons, join your pharmacy’s mailing list and scrub your inbox ahead of putting in each of your orders to see what deals you might have available.
6. Buy a 3-Month Supply
Bulk-buying is a practice that not everyone that picks up prescriptions knows about. Usually, you can pick up 3-month’s worth of a medication you’ve been prescribed, depending on your refill allotment.
When you pick up 3-months of medications at once, you’re making a bulk drug purchase which many pharmacies will reward by extending you discounts.
Ask your pharmacy if you can get better prices on discount prescription drugs by bulk ordering. If your pharmacy doesn’t offer a discount on your drug’s sticker price, see if they’ll at least waive shipping charges so you can get future orders sent to your home.
If you can save yourself a few dollars worth of gas on every prescription order, that could add up to something significant over a year.
7. Reduce Your Medication Dependencies
While this strategy won’t explicitly help you get cheaper drugs, it will help you move away from needing to buy as much. Oftentimes, patients use drugs to regulate conditions that they can self-regulate via making lifestyle changes.
Things like high blood pressure, stress, depression, and more all have holistic healing pathways that are worth discussing with your doctor. If you can explore new routes to getting healthy, you may very well find yourself saving thousands on medication per year by simply not needing it.
Discount Prescription Drugs Are Available if You Know Where to Look
People everywhere cut down their pharmaceutical costs by acquiring discount prescription drugs. How they achieve that end is largely via the tips we’ve shared with you.
We hope that some (or all) of our tips resonated to the point where you’ll start to put them into action. We’re confident that if you do, you’ll reliably save money every month.
Curious to learn more about prescription drugs, medicare prescription drug plans, and other related topics? If you are, our team welcomes you to explore additional, new content on our blog!
