Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Need Help Paying for Those Meds?

A website that I learned about a few years ago that you might want to learn about as well is the Partnership for Prescription Assistance.
http://kidneyinthenews.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/pills1.jpg
At the time I was working in an allergy/pulmonology/sleep clinic and many of the medications that we prescribed regularly (Allegra, Advair, Provigil, etc) are expensive and do not have generics, so we gave out a lot of samples and filled out a lot of prior auths. One day somebody tole me about pparx and since then I have referred a lot of people to it. The website is a collaboration between a number of pharmaceutical companies and prescription assistance groups and acts as a resource to help you find ways to get your prescriptions for cheaper or even for free.

To test it out, I selected Prilosec, Synthroid, Atenolol, Klonopin, Xanax, Provigil, and Advair (a med or two from each patient I had today) and made up some basic information about myself (they don't ask for any identifying info, just stuff like what your salary is and if you have medicare). I made myself a relatively poor (1000 per month) medicare recipient in a 3 person household and they came back with 7 different programs to help cover my prescription meds. I glanced at the overviews for a couple of them and they seem like genuinely helpful legitimite programs (for instance, did you know that GSK offers a huge list of medications for free to needy families - such as Advair, Coreg, Avandia, Augmentin, Zofran, Flonase, Paxil, Requip, Wellbutrin, Imitrex and on and on and on?) Me neither. But now I do.

Anyway, for those of you that have a list of medications, and may be struggling to pay for them (or even if you aren't, it is worth seeing if there is any deal you can get), or for those of you who may have patients who struggle to pay for meds, go check this site out and put it on your list of helpful resources.

Do I sound like I'm getting paid for this? Maybe I should be.


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2 comments:

Richard Sagall said...

All the information on pharmaceutical patient assistance programs plus hundreds of other programs is available for free at www.needymeds.com. Each workday over 9,500 people visit our site. We have all the applications on the website.

Our information is ease to access, updated regularly, and free. We gather no information about our users.

You don't have to pay to apply to these programs. Most are easy to apply to and respond quickly.

Rich Sagall, MD
President
NeedyMeds.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 219
Gloucester, MA 01931
richsagall@needymeds.com

Bianca Castafiore? said...

Merci beaucoup, Braden, et Monsieur le médecin Sagall, aussi!
Such helpful information! La Belle Bianca's good friend, the Retired Educator, spent $950 in the mois of juillet alone on médicaments... La Belle Bianca, Dieu merci and thanks be to God, has no need of medications, being perfect in all ways -- but she will share this information with the poor decrepit destitute Educator. Thank you encore une fois...