Prescription Drugs for Half Price or Less

Chapter 1 Who Is This Book For? Everybody Who Uses Prescription Drugs Why This Book? There are two kinds of people in this country: those who take prescription drugs and those who will. The purpose of this book is simple: to show you how you can dramatically cut your cost of prescription drugs. Following the strategies in this book, you can usually save 50-90% on your prescription costs. Are you thinking that this is impossible--or that it's some sort of gimmick? It's not either. The fact is that most people don't know the simple techniques that can easily deliver huge savings on their prescription drugs. Here's just one example. Lipitor, which is used to treat high cholesterol, is the largest-selling drug in the world--$11 billion in sales each year. One of the most frequent dosages is a single 10 mg tablet taken once a day to reduce LDL cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) by 25-30%. At retail, a thirty-day supply costs about $65. Most people get started on Lipitor when their doctors give them a handful of free samples and a refillable prescription for twelve thirty-day supplies. Most of these patients go to their local drugstores to get them filled. If they are among the forty-five-million-plus Americans who don't have prescription drug insurance, they have to pay the full $65 every thirty days. Very few of these consumers realize that they have many lower cost options that work just as well. For example: A Generic Drug. Approximately two-thirds of the consumers taking 10 mg Lipitor can just as safely and effectively lower their LDL cholesterol by taking a similar drug called lovastatin that costs about $43 at retail.1 Savings:$22/month over Lipitor (34% savings) Lower Cost Drugstore. By shopping around by phone or on the Internet with several different pharmacies, this same generic lovastatin can be purchased for as little as $23 (Costco mail order, no membership required). Also, your local pharmacy may be willing to match such prices in order to keep you as a customer. Savings: $43/month over Lipitor (66% savings) Tablet Splitting. Some patients may find that lovastatin doesn't work as well as Lipitor. For them, their doctors can write prescriptions for a half tablet daily of 20 mg Lipitor, and receive exactly the same medication in the same dose for about $47. Savings: $28/month over the 10 mg Lipitor (43% savings) Over a period of years, these savings add up to thousands of dollars for just this one drug. And there are hundreds of other drugs for which similar savings are not only possible, but easy for the consumer who knows what to do. With this book, you can and will save hundreds or thousands of dollars in prescription costs. I'm going to give you detailed, essential, and easily implemented information that will enable you to do this. I've been a healthcare insider, entrepreneur, and consumer advocate for thirty-five years. One of my companies, Peak Health Care, introduced health benefit innovations during the 1970s and 1980s that have since become industry standards in their markets, such as insurance coverage for physician office visits, full hospital coverage with no patient cost, and low-cost prescription drug benefits. Both members and their employers saved hundreds of millions of dollars on their healthcare as a result. More recently, my newest company, Hyde Rx Services Corporation, has brought the cost savings techniques of this book to employers and their employees. The result has been that thousands of members along with their employers are saving huge amounts of money for high quality prescription drug benefits. In Prescription Drugs at Half Price--or Less, I tell you the techniques that the drug industry doesn't want you to know about, why drugs cost so much, and how you can beat them at their own game. Who Is This Book For? This book is for anyone--insured or not--who wants to pHyde, Stephen is the author of 'Prescription Drugs for Half Price or Less ', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553383904 and ISBN 0553383906.