Saving money

I feel bad for families who don’t have medical plans, or those who live in the US where I’ve heard there are a lot of things that aren’t covered the same way that they are here in Canada.

Even with coverage, there was a lot of expense that we had to deal with.

When we first started in this journey, we were totally overwhelmed with everything and didn’t have the time, or energy to think of ways to save money, but we wish we had.

Recently we started looking into where we were getting our prescriptions filled. Part of the reason we choose the pharmacy was location, and convenience since they were open 24 hours in case we accidentally forgot to get a refill, but we were paying $13 for every prescription/refill which could come to $50-75 per visit depending on the number of items that we needed to pick up. We also didn’t fully communicate with our doctor our actual usage so that we wouldn’t have to make as many trips to the pharmacy.  This obviously changes, and takes a while to figure out the ‘average amount’ used per month, but we could have asked more questions too. When we finally did this, he was able to prescribe larger volume (usually for test strips and needle tips) to last at least a month. This saved us frequent visits to the pharmacy, but also saves on the dispensing fees.

We also recently discovered that the Costco pharmacy charges much less. You don’t need a membership I’m told to access the pharmacy, but we have one anyways. Dispensing fees are only $3.25 so that is helping to reduce the costs significantly.

There are also online options here in Ontario I’m told with no dispensing fees that I’m currently looking into how it works to make sure it can charge my drug plan so I don’t have to have to pay out of pocket then submit for reimbursement.

As I find more cost saving ideas I will be sure to share!