Hunting Discounts

A lady presented with five prescriptions all typed up on one paper. I hate when prescribers do this. Stop being cheap, prescribers. Use ONE piece of paper for EACH prescription, please.  

So the nice lady only wants me to fill one med out of the five because GoodRx says we have the best price on that one particular medication. So I tediously type in the GoodRx crap and fill that one prescription AND do the extra paperwork required to fill only one prescription that exists with others we're not filling. At check out I ask her about the other four.

"Well, these two I'm getting at Wagmart. This one at Flea Circus, and this one at SVC. Those are the best prices on GoodRx at those pharmacies."

So if I've put you to sleep with this blog post, what this means is that this lady is taking this one sheet of paper to four different pharmacies to fill all five medications to get her the best discount. Imagine the carbon footprint from this odyssey. It's enough to send a tree hugger into a coma.

Later when it slowed down and I had a minute, I couldn't help myself. I looked up the prices of the five meds on the GoodRx website and compared with Wagmart, Flea Circus, and SVC. Then I plugged the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.

The incredible savings from her hunt?

Can you guess?

Oh, this will blow your socks off.

My analysis showed that if she had just let me fill all five it would have cost her $9.72 more than all that driving around. Her NET savings from seeing four pharmacies for five different meds amounted to $9.72.

My dad had a good way of describing people like this. He would have said this lady is "stepping over dollars to pick up dimes." I would add that she wasted a lot of people's time in the process too.