Save Money on Your Prescriptions Using Manufacturer Coupons

I had a great experience at work this week. One of my customers came in and he had just been diagnosed with a blood clot. His Physician wrote him a prescription for Xarelto, a blood thinner, to take for 3 weeks. He brought it to us to fill and we discovered that his insurance does not cover it. His cost was going to be $520!! I heard my technician advise him to look for a coupon online. He clearly did not understand what she was talking about. He wasn’t going to NOT fill a prescription for a blood clot, no matter the price.

He agreed to pay the full price and as I filled it I just thought to myself “There must be something I can do to help him.” I quickly found the website www.xarelto.com where I was able to locate a one time use coupon that would give him one month of medication for free! I called him over and explained what he would need to do to get this coupon. He was hesitant, but thankfully his wife urged him to look into it. He didn’t have a smartphone so he went home to print out his coupon. About thirty minutes later he and his wife returned, coupon in hand, and it worked! $520 saved two weeks before Christmas! His wife was so grateful and said she didn’t know where to begin to thank me. I just told her Merry Christmas and that I love to find things like that coupon to help my customers. My entire staff is very good at things like this and our customers love it when we can save them a big chunk of money in just a few minutes.

How can this help you?

If you take a brand name drug that has no generic or if you just would rather not take the generic you can likely find a similar coupon. Most manufacturer coupons will take a big chunk off of your copay. Some take off a set amount such as up to $50 or $100 off. Others will lower your copay to a certain amount. An example would be that it would lower your copay to $20 from whatever it was. Cards like this example would usually have a max amount that they would take off.

Why would a manufacturer do this? 

A lot of drug companies get frustrated by losing almost all of their market share as soon as their patent runs out on each drug. Other times, patients will choose not to use their medication because the insurance copay is not affordable, there is no generic available, and will instead ask for another medication that is cheaper or does have a generic. If a drug company can basically waive a portion of your copay they will still get a hefty payment from your insurance company. If they can take the sting out of the monthly cost from you then they get to keep a customer using their medication. They keep customers, you save money, everybody wins.

Where can I find a coupon? 

There are literally hundreds of manufacturer coupons available if you just know where to look. There are also dozens of sites that look like manufacturer coupons but aren’t. The key here is to make sure you are on the manufacturer’s site. You can usually accomplish this very easily by just going directly to the site for the drug you have been prescribed (i.e. nameofdrug.com). Most companies will let you sign up by just creating a login on their site and then you can print the coupon on your printer or bring it in on your smartphone.  In my example at the beginning of this post you can see I used the site www.xarelto.com. There are many cards that say they will cover hundreds of different drugs with one card. These are only discount cards that are used if you don’t have any insurance. They can be very helpful for generic drugs but rarely save you very much on brand name drugs. If you need help finding one please send me an email at brady@helpfulpharmacist.com and I will be happy to try and help you .

What’s the catch? 

There are some exceptions to using these coupons. The main one being that if you are on Medicare Part D, Medicaid, Tricare, or any government-paid insurance plan you are ineligible. The government decided a long time ago that companies were not able to entice customers to use their plans by making them special offers. It makes very little sense to me why they would shrug off money that a drug company would want to give back to their patients. It really isn’t fair, and I don’t believe this is the type of “incentive” that our government was targeting with that law but it is what it is. Your Pharmacist is not purposely trying to exclude you from using a coupon. Actually, the pharmacy’s payment is the same whether you use a coupon or not.

Other exceptions might be that you can only use the coupon once, or for a certain number of times. Usually you can just go get a new one once you have used up your current card, but that doesn’t always work. Any exceptions will be listed in the fine print on your card. Lastly, that drug may not be covered by your insurance. The cards are designed to discount your copay, not supplement the entire cost of the drug. Sometimes when this happens your pharmacy can submit a prior authorization form to your doctor’s office and get the drug added to your formulary for you. If the copay is high, no problem, you have that covered.

I hope you found this information to be helpful. I would love to hear your experiences or help you with any questions about this topic. Please comment below with your feedback or send me an email. I will try to respond to every email I receive. If you have someone you know who could benefit from this, please share it with them.