An Eye for an Eye: Taming Excessive Prescription Costs

Life Lesson #24: The importance of wearing safety eyewear when playing with your kids

You don’t have to look very hard to find countless articles about the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs.  A few years ago, Martin Shkreli made headlines when he sparked outrage by raising the price of a drug used to treat parasitic infection from $13.50 to $750 a pill.

With the cost of prescription drugs soaring, what can you do?  You could try to save money by illegally smuggling prescription drugs from Canada, like Frank Gallagher did in the television series, Shameless.  Or you can follow the lawful, yet sometimes unconventional, principles of Richonomics.

The Story: It all started like any other typical evening routine with the kids.  My 3-year-old daughter, Madeleine, was perched on the bathroom countertop, settling down after the daily dental-hygiene scuffle.

Before transitioning to story time, I did what any dad would naturally do: I formed vicious “monster claws” with my fingers and growled savagely as I launched into a playful attack.

Madeleine retaliated with excitement.  She let out a ferocious roar as her fingers wildly lunged toward my face.

There are moments in life when we come to recognize our own limitations. And this was one of them.  Instantly, I realized my 43-year-old body no longer possessed the reaction time I had previously enjoyed in my youth.  Moreover, my sloth-like response was ill-matched against my 3-year-old’s grossly under-developed motor skills.

Time seemed to stand still as one of Madeleine’s dagger-like fingernails suddenly stabbed my left eyeball.  My knees buckled and I dropped to the floor in agony.

An expensive emergency room diagnosis revealed a corneal abrasion.  The doctor administered numbing eye drops to help ease the searing pain and antibiotics to prevent infection, but otherwise advised that I should be as good as new inside of a few days.

Fast forward several weeks and two ophthalmologist follow-up appointments, and I still had blurry vision.  While the scratch itself had healed, my eyeball still remained swollen.  So, my doctor prescribed steroid eye drops to help reduce inflammation and accelerate the recovery process.

It wasn’t until I received a pre-approval phone call from the Rite Aid pharmacy that I realized this was going to be no ordinary prescription.

The Breakdown: Those lousy eye drops were going to cost an insurance-adjusted $187.29.  Ouch!

My first reaction was to request a generic.  But none were available, as Bausch & Lomb apparently cornered the eye-health product market.

I needed more time to think, so I put the prescription on hold.

I called a Costco pharmacy to see if better prices were available.  But they quoted me an out-of-pocket cost of $228.  Another dead end!

I scoured the internet with my one good eye, looking for another solution.  That’s when I happened upon a manufacture’s $60 copay promotion for Medicare Part D patients.

Don’t worry, this post isn’t about confessing to insurance fraud.  As I’m not 65, I don’t qualify for Medicare; but it did give me an idea.

Digging further, I found another promotion on Bausch & Lomb’s website.  Unfortunately, based on my insurance, I didn’t qualify for that one either.  And so, following a Richonomics’ protocol, I persevered and called Bausch & Lomb’s customer service department to see if they had any other offers better matched to my circumstances. That’s when a helpful voice guided me to yet another offer: a $75 copay for eligible uninsured patients.  But I DO have insurance.

The representative explained they would treat my situation as ‘uninsured’ for the purpose of coding the promotion, since I would be paying out-of-pocket and also didn’t qualify for their ‘insured’ offer.

As this offer was only valid at a Walgreens pharmacy, I simply had to request a prescription transfer and I was one step closer to clear vision, with an additional $112.29 in my pocket to boot.

If only I could’ve found a less expensive solution for the other $1,983.44 emergency room visit and ophthalmologist appointments.  Fortunately, after insurance adjustments, it was a much reduced $775.38.  Of course, I did not use an HSA debit card and I saved the receipts for reasons explained in a previous post, ‘When Etiquette and Hygiene Collide: Investing in an HSA’.

You may be wondering if there is a plan to recapture the other $775.  I did indeed design a less orthodox, biblical-based solution to recoup my expenses.  The law of retaliation seems quite fitting: an eye for an eye, etc.  Or, in this case, an eye for a 529 plan contribution.  I just need to make sure my wife doesn’t go soft in 17 years when Madeleine asks why her college fund falls short of covering her senior-year college books.