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The Ramblings of Master D. Homie

Prescription Drug Pricing Online

clock May 24, 2009 01:53 by author Master D. Homie

I went to Walgreens recently to have a prescription (Qvar) refilled and with no insurance co-pay it came to $111.99. The inhaler is good for 100 puffs. In this case, the inhaler is used once per day. That a little over $1 per day… not so bad I guess. Currently there are no generic versions of Qvar so I thought $111.99 was enough to warrant a look into the pricing online. What I found was quite surprising. I thought I would find competitive prescription drug pricing online rather easily. I must have looked for about an hour for pricing search engines or companies like Walgreens readily making available their pricing without the need to fill out forms or obtain usernames & passwords. NOT THE CASE! I found tons of websites that want all your information before they will give you a price. I found the following websites willing to give pricing online without all the BS. The websites listed below all supply Qvar. I was able to find Qvar for as little as $83.72 which is $28.27 less than Walgreens.

See what the FDA has to say about Buying Medicines and Medical Products Online

This is the only “qualifying” live pricing search engine that I could find. HealthTrans is a Pharmacy Benefit Manager and it looks to require some type of membership through an employer. The price search does provide some valuable insight into who is charging what (basically who charges less) for a particular prescription. Obviously this doesn’t necessarily reflect the pricing you will receive. I thought it was interesting enough to see not only the available pharmacies in your locality, but also the price comparisons between pharmacies.

http://www.prescriptiongiant.com – Found the best pricing here

http://www.familymeds.com – The only “qualifying” Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites™ pharmacy I found online.

http://rxusa.com

http://www.drugstore.com

Through this process, I have discovered that Americans do not care about the price of their medications (most likely because they pay for it like they pay their taxes.... it comes out of their paycheck and it feels good to be "taken care of"). People will search online for pricing for their electronics, computers, office supplies, and all kinds of gadgets and crap, but when it comes to your healthcare... they don't care about the price... WHY!? Demand competitive pricing and value for EVERYTHING you buy people... even your healthcare.



Master Games List

clock May 24, 2009 00:29 by author Master D. Homie

A few months back Nintendo changed their searchable list of games to a terrible format. They made it difficult to find the games I was interested in. I have since found the old searchable list of games under the support section of their website. The old list is now called Master Games List and allows a significantly more granular search although I still cannot narrow the search to just Wii games that are not Virtual Console or WiiWare. Nintendo even has classic games in the list. There are over four thousand games in there! They have downloadable (PDF) lists of their classic games available on the same page. It’s not searchable the same way… but I’m glad to still see a list of all their old games available online.



ARCO Debit MasterCard®

clock May 12, 2009 22:29 by author Master D. Homie

So I’m getting gas at ARCO and I see this credit card looking flyer and decided to grab it to see what it was. It works kinda like a PayPal Debit Card except this thing is linked directly to your checking account. The attraction is no longer being required to pay the 45¢ “convenience” fee per transaction whenever you purchase anything. It looks like a good idea… but I’m not necessarily convinced just yet…. but wait … there’s more! You also earn rewards† on the things that you purchase. For each dollar you spend using you PIN, you receive a point. If you purchase something using it as a Debit MasterCard, you receive 2 points for each dollar spent. They even have a Preferred version of the Debit MasterCard where you pay an annual fee of $24.95 and get double points. Sounds like a pretty good deal… no 45¢ fee anymore… get bonus points that turn into cash (currently $.001 per point otherwise known as .1¢). I will apply for one of these cards, but I just thought the fine print was humorous.

†Rewards are not earned for ampm, ARCO and non-ARCO gasoline brand purchases.