Ask Kim
Picking a Medicare Drug Card No Easy Trick
When will medicare prescription discount cards be available and how can I find out which one is best for me?
By Kimberly Lankford, Contributing Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance
April 7, 2004
I've heard a lot about the medicare prescription discount cards. When will they be available and how can I find out which one is best for me?
You can sign up for a medicare-approved drug discount card as early as May 3, and start using it on June 1. But choosing the right card isn't going to be easy.
The cards are an interim option for reducing drug costs until the medicare drug insurance program goes into effect in 2006. The cards promise to trim prescription drug prices between 10% and 25%. So far, 28 private sponsors -- including insurers, benefits managers and pharmacies -- have been approved to offer the cards, which will cost up to $30 per year.
Two types of cards will be available:
- Exclusive cards will be offered by some managed health-care plans, such as HMOs and PPOs that participate in Medicare Advantage plans (formerly Medicare + Choice). If your HMO offers a card, it will be the only medicare-endorsed card that you can use. The good news is that it will offer the best discounts -- an incentive to draw more medicare beneficiaries into managed care.
- General cards will be offered through chain pharmacies and pharmacy-benefits managers. They must be offered to all medicare beneficiaries.
If you decide to buy a general card, choose carefully. Card issuers could change discounts as frequently as once per week, but you can switch cards only once before 2006. Discounts also will vary by drug and by geographic area, something to keep in mind if you keep more that one home. And if you take several drugs, it is unlikely that a single discount card will cover all of them. So you'll need to get prices for all your drugs from all the issuers in your state and do the math.
Each card's details are still being ironed out, the Medicare.gov Web site will provide several tools to help you determine which card will provide the best deals on the prescriptions you currently use. You can also call 800-Medicare or contact your state health insurance assistance program for help selecting a card.
Although you can have only one medicare-approved discount card at a time, you can still have other drug-discount cards that aren't part of the medicare program. It's a good idea to hold onto those other cards because they might provide larger discounts on some drugs you use.
You will only be able to use one discount card per purchase, but you could take all your cards with you to the pharmacy and ask which provides the best price for each prescription.
To search for other drug discount cards and programs, check out the National Council on the Aging's BenefitsCheckUpRx and the Medicare Rights Center's Help Paying for Prescription Drugs page. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America's HelpingPatients.orgWeb site can also help you find out if you're eligible for pharmaceutical assistance programs offering deep discounts for low-income people.