Pharmacy Membership…The Most Common Way To Pay

Prescription drugs are a huge cost to the healthcare system. Studies have shown that prescription medications take up over 11% of the total healthcare budget. If you turn on the TV, and especially during primetime TV hours when it is ridiculously expensive to market anything, one can always find pharmaceutical commercials.

In fact, drug companies spend over $6 Billion on advertising. Between 1997 to 2016, in that twenty year span the out-of-pocket cost by patients almost tripled from $116 Billion to $330 Billion….this is money coming out of your pocket, NOT the insurance companies. In that same 20-year span, the FDA oversight essentially has dried up...going from 156 violations for misleading consumers down to 11, that is a 90+% drop!

 

Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs)

When we talk about big dollars and lack of oversight, there are all kinds of “middle-men” that find their way into the food chain. Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) are one such service that is usually shrouded in secrecy. That is not to say that they don’t serve a vital purpose, because they do! It’s just that most are involved in murky markups, manufacturer rebates, etc. Did you know that until the fall of 2018, there were gag laws in place that made it illegal for your pharmacist to tell you that the medication that you are picking up would be cheaper if you paid cash for it instead of using your insurance card. After some common sense prevailed in our elected leaders, this gag rule was finally repealed. Now you can ask your pharmacist if the medication that you are picking would be cheaper by paying cash or not.

 

Generic Drugs And Costs

90% of prescribed drugs are generic, and over 50% of them will cost less than $5 per month. Medication non-compliance accounts for 50% of treatment failures and kills over 125,000 American every year. We must do better!

 

Discounts On Medications

There are discount medication programs that can offer even better pricing with a small membership fee. At WoW Health, we believe that medications have to be affordable. Our goal is not only to help our communities see their healthcare professionals for evaluation, but also to provide the most convenient and affordable means to obtain any necessary medications to manage their medical conditions. As part of our commitment to transparency and affordability, the medication membership program offered with the WoW Care Plan allows all members to realize these wholesale discounts.

In fact, if you do the math you will realize that for most members, just one month’s savings from the medication program will more than pay for the yearly membership of the WoW Care Plan. And because our focus is you, we make sure that you can pick up that medication from any neighborhood pharmacy, including large retailers like CVS and Walgreens. Let’s eliminate medication noncompliance as a reason for worsening medical conditions.

 

Conclusion

As we continue our conversation about the best way to obtain healthcare, we are going to keep growing services that are vital to a complete continuum of care. Next we will discuss the importance of imaging and diagnostic services which are necessary to help doctors make the correct diagnosis.