Hey my once daily inhaler I use every day of the week was only $326.60 this month. Neato.
Three hundred and twenty six dollars every fucking month. And sixty fucking cents. WITH INSURANCE. It’s six hundred fucking dollars without insurance!
Healthcare is a fuck.
Saint Luigi protect us.
sorry you failed to meet your 5000 deductible you only spent 4985.36 out of pocket but it doesn’t matter since it will reset at the end of the month then you can try again and if you meet it then we will cover 25% of in network expenses (except copays) out of network is of course still not covered, until you hit your out of pocket max of 17k for individuals up until the plan limit of 20k at which point your secondary will have to kick in also this is the most efficient system it’s all quite simple really“Coinsurance” is such a racket. Just when you’ve finally met your deductible and expect your insurance to cover the rest you find out you’re now in the coinsurance zone so you’ve still gotta pay 20-40% of the inflated billing.
The people that dream up these kinds of things deserve to get thrown into volcanoes
That’s a good deal!
Line go up
The more middlemen you have to go through to get something necessary, the more expensive it is, and the better the economy is.
This is the best system ever developed, don’t question it.
I am but grist for the mill.
Death to Amerikkka death to for-profit healthcare, death to JK Rowling and insurance companies and may we have a million Luigis bloom and also fuck the Amerikkkan empire and fuck all the troops and fuck anyone who says “i can help you medically for a price” and fuck every single cop ever
The Hexbear Manifesto
The point of health insurance is to extract wealth from proletarian necessity. They are a leech. Their only balance is to make themselves better than nothing, but not through cost cutting, but monopoly.
We are all drained by them. But they hurt the least wealthy most. I’m sorry you have to deal with them through s disability.
When my son was born I immediately got him added to my insurance plan. Somehow his name had a typo (not on my end, I had to send in a PDF file and triple checked it, still have the email that I sent in). I called the insurance company to let them know and they basically said oops we’ll fix it, so they readded him as a dependent and we got a new card for him when he was about 3 months old ( it took them like 2 months to fix it)
The issue here is that he now had a different member ID number, and Jerry Smith wasn’t covered by insurance up until those 3 month, only Jerrry Smithe was, and my son isn’t Jerrry Smithe, so everything that got submitted to insurance up until we got his new card wasn’t covered by insurance, doesn’t go towards our deductible or out of pocket maximum and is fully on us to pay. His 1 month vaccines alone were fucking $17k, how, why, maybe the antivaxxers are onto something? Those microchips must be expensive.
I’m fighting it, but Jesus Christ the run around is a god damn marathon. We’re almost $50k in the hole here and the customer support just keeps saying “Jerry Smith wasn’t covered under your plan at that time”.
just checked a pharmacy website in Colombia, that exact stuff, name brand, is $72 for a 30 dose inhaler
unlimited luigis on the Amerikkkan “health care system”
Jesus fucking christ
Just checked. Completely free on the NHS. Fuck Amerikkka.
The NHS pays £44.50 per inhaler according to this document: https://nhssomerset.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/Revised-inhaler-guide-v14.pdf
Amerikkkan healthcare is depraved.
I was gonna say, most prescriptions are £9 a pop, but that can contain multiple inhalers, and there are a bunch of ways to get free prescriptions, so one way or another we’re paying a fraction of the price.
that’s still pretty prohibitive by local standards so doctors would probably prescribe a cheaper cocktail of inhalers with the individual drug components. realistically people would get it through the official pharmacy of the HMO-equivalent they’re signed up with (everyone is, in theory, registered to one) and it would be a couple bucks in copay. but as an unaffiliated tourist you could get it for that private pharmacy price, delivered right to your hotel.
wtf. Unbelievable
$31.50 AUD for a non concession card holder and that’s seen as expensive
Love to pay 10x the cost for something, and not even factoring in the AUD - USD conversion rates. That’s something like $20 here.
what the actual
Fucked thing is if you were here as a tourist it’s only 80 AUD on non pbs script
Would literally be cheaper to fly to Australia to buy a few months supply.
: “heheheheh! Healthcare is a luxury, and even if you do pay, it’s MY business so I don’t have to help you if I don’t want to kiddo! It’s called freedom!”
: “Ok, so I guess I will never buy health insurance if it will make no difference.”
: “Buh….buh….YA GOTTA! NOT GIVING ME MONEY FOR NO REASON IS A CRIME!1!1!”I feel like I’m going to have a major incident and die, with the last thing I ever do is frantically try and figure out which hospital is in network so I can get an Uber there (ambulances are expensive) as I black out
Emergency rooms are all equally as expensive. I don’t think there are “networks” for ERs specifically.
Fuck them leeches, I’m wishing a very free medicine for everyone.The point of it is to provide the cheapest service possible for the highest price they can get array with.
It’s a business, what other point could there possibly be?
The point of health insurance? Your money or your life. Often both.
Any violence against healthcare entities is self-defense.
Excuse me what the fuck.
Try going to the pharmacy and asking to pay cash. Don’t tell them you have insurance. The cash price is sometimes insanely cheaper, like $150-$200 cheaper in this case.
I can usually get an Albuterol inhaler for about $50 cash.
Also don’t be afraid to shop around and ask a few places what their cash prices are on things.
I have been down that route, cash price is 800 at HEB, north of 750 at Walmart, CVS is close to 800. Without insurance, my best option is the Goodrx card thing, and even then it’s a couple dollars over 600.
The mfgr used to offer a discount coupon, but it’s only available once apparently, for “up to” 12 months and my discount off of it expired four months ago. It’s tied to my ins ID so I can’t just sign up for another one and do it again. It made it a ‘manageable’ $100 a month instead for about eight months
The office manager at my pulmonologists office and I used to date once upon a time so if she is working when I have an office visit I’ll get a month or two’s worth of samples to hold me over, but they haven’t had any the last two times I’ve been. I’ve tried a few other inhalers that are much cheaper, but they just don’t work on me like the expensive one does. Im just glad I don’t have to use the higher dosage version. I’ve been taking this med for about two years now, and I’ve just gotten used to it. This month it just stings a little more than usual because I started a new job and am flat broke this month.
*fixed some sentences. Fat fingered my phone keyboard.
For these prices I would book a cheap flight to Mexico and buy 10 of them
I’m strongly considering it. I’m approx 100-150 miles from a part of the tex/mex border. I grew up even closer so I know where to go, I used to cross the border to go get drunk on weekends back in my teens and 20s.
I might have to become an international drug smuggler so I can continue to breathe.
Not kidding it’s a viable option.
Shit in the US near the border you will find tons of billboards for dentists in Mexico and such
Ugh that’s a nightmare. Everyone in my family is in generics and pays cash so it’s a “manageable” $300-$400/month for us to stay alive. Some of the non-generic scrips are insane.
Have you tried budesonide-formoterol (Symbicort) it is a much cheaper dual action medication that is just as effective for most patients, with the benefit of having generic options available that can be purchased without insurance usually for under 100$, and is covered by most insurances.
I actually prefer it to Trelegy because it’s an aerosol, so you usually have less problems with improper uptake and are less likely to have issues with things like thrush.
I’ve tried Symbicort, Breo Ellipta, Advair, Incruse Elliptra, Spiriva, and maybe one or two others over the last four/five years. Trelegy seems to keep me clear the longest. I’ve never actually gotten thrush from it, and I’m not the best about consistently rinsing after use. Now that I’ve typed that, I’ll probably get thrush the next use with my luck. I’ve got a routine in the AM. Wipe down CPAP mask, two rips on the albuterol, three min apart, then rip on the trelegy.
Since this post went up I have gotten another appt at both my pulmonologists and my GP, to ask about equivalents, even if it’s multiple inhalers, as the combination of medicines is available with two or more inhalers.
My appt at my lung Dr is in four weeks, GP is in eight or nine days. I’m also back on the cancellation list at both places so maybe something will pop up before then.
The real benefit of trelegy is that it’s three medications in one. It’s steroid, laba (Long-acting beta-agonist), and lama (Long-acting muscarinic antagonists ). Out of those three the one that is costing you the big bucks is the Lama, it’s also the one that symbicort is missing, so it’s probably the one that is making the difference for you.
Luckily I believe there is a generic option for a Lama inhaler (tiotropium bromide) that is less than a hundred bucks out of pocket with a coupon.
You would probably have much better coverage for something like a generic symbicort and a generic Spiriva (tiotropium). A lot of manufacturers basically keep doing different combinations to keep their drugs from being moved over to generics. So a combo is probably going to be the most effective cheap option for ya.
Good luck! I wish more providers took more time to consider their patients financial health as well, but unfortunately a lot of prescribers are just as lost as a lot of patients when it comes to understanding health coverage. The insurance and pharma companies like to make it as difficult as possible and offload all the blame on the healthcare providers.
have you considered just dating the pulmonologist?
The hospital and drug companies are also fucking with you. Inhalers here for cost that much.
