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How to Save Money on Prescription Medication

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I’ve seen some tragic situations over the years when people can’t afford their meds. For example, I’ve met organ transplant patients who couldn’t pay for their anti-rejection drugs and ended up losing the organ they had struggled so hard to receive. I, myself, have dealt with some terrible withdrawal symptoms when I couldn’t access my mental health medications. Therefore, I know firsthand how important it is to learn how to save money on prescription medication.

Talk to Professionals to Save Money on Prescription Medication

The first step to take if you’re struggling to pay for your prescription medications is to ask for help. There are several different types of professionals that you can talk to about how to save money on prescription medication.

Talk to Your Doctor

Your first line of defense against expensive prescription medication is the person who prescribes the meds. Talk to your doctor. In fact, you may need to talk to multiple doctors: a general doctor, a specialist, a psychiatrist, etc.

Be very upfront with these professionals about how hard it is for you to pay for your prescription medications. Ask them what the options are. Oftentimes, they’ll be able to provide solutions. It might be as simple as changing the prescription to something more affordable that still works for you. Alternatively, they may be able to write a letter explaining to your health insurance why you need that specific medication.

Furthermore, your doctor may be able to offer samples and coupons to help you save money on prescription medication. At the very least, when your doctor knows that you are struggling, you’ll have someone there to help you manage symptoms related to not accessing your medication.

Talk to Your Pharmacist

Your pharmacist is another great resource to help you find ways to save money on prescription medications. They are familiar with all of the meds. They know what type of discounts are available, which insurance covers certain costs, and what generic versions of medications are available.

They may or may not be able to actually offer you a discount. Perhaps they’ll know of certain tricks, such as saving money by getting a 90-day supply instead of a 30-day supply. However, even if they can’t solve the problem, they can often point you in the right direction to find someone who can help.

Ask Your Health Insurance How to Save Money on Prescription Medication

Oftentimes, the biggest problem is that your health insurance doesn’t cover the medication that you need. Or it doesn’t pay very much of the cost. Therefore, you can go straight to your health insurance provider to get help.

If you have the option to visit your health insurance provider in person, then that’s your best bet. If not, then be prepared to wait on the phone for a significant amount of time before you reach the person who can help you. If you are persistent, they are often able to find some resolution.

You may need to discuss getting a different plan with your health insurance provider. Alternatively, they may be able to tell you what some other drug options are to reduce your costs. Then you can take that information back to your doctor to see if those medications would work for you.

Contact the Drug Manufacturer

There are certain prescription medications that are just very expensive. However, the drug manufacturers know that they have customers who can’t afford those high fees. Therefore, they often offer ways to reduce the costs of those medications.

For example, they may offer a discount program. They may provide samples or coupons. You never know unless you ask. Therefore, you should ask.

Find an Advocate

If you have tried all of these different outlets and you still can’t afford your medications, then it’s time to look for an advocate. Your therapist could be an ally in this. If you have a case manager, then they might be able to help. Alternatively, look for a lawyer, a local group, or a friend who has knowledge about how to deal with the prescription medication and health insurance industries. It helps to have someone in your corner who knows the language.

Common Ways to Save Money on Prescription Medication

Talking to professionals is your best route to save money on prescription medication. However, it helps a lot if you know what to ask for. Moreover, there are some things that you can try for yourself. Here are some of the most common ways that people save money on prescription medication:

Change the Medication

When talking to these professionals, find out if you have the option to switch to a more affordable medication. If there is a generic version of the same pill, then try that. If there’s a similar medication that’s cheaper, then try that. Always work with your doctor when switching meds, of course.

Change the Amount of Medication

Sometimes you can save money on prescription medication just by changing the number of pills that you order. A 60-day or 90-day supply may be cheaper per pill than a 30-day supply. Furthermore, it can reduce the number of times you pay a co-pay.

Also, ask about getting a stronger dose that you can split in half. For example, get a prescription for 45 days of a pill that’s twice the strength you need then cut those in half and you have medication for 90 days.

Shop with Coupons

Drug manufacturers offer coupons to reduce the cost of medications. You can also sometimes find other coupons online for various meds. Take a look at what’s out there before you pay full price.

Shop Around with a Tool Like GoodRx

How much you pay for your prescriptions depends on a variety of factors. One of those is the location where you buy the pills. Therefore, you can save money on prescription medication just by shopping around. You can use a comparison shopping tool such as GoodRx to easily find the least expensive option near you for the medications that you need. You may discover that you need to visit a few different pharmacies to get the best price if you have multiple prescriptions. Given the high cost of meds, that can be well worth the effort.

Make Sure You Have the Right Health Insurance

If you haven’t reviewed your health insurance options recently then make sure that you do so. Find out whether you have the right plan in terms of the medications they cover, your co-pays, and your monthly payment. Moreover, see if you qualify for any low-income programs in your area to help you save money on prescription medications. In addition to Medicare/Medicaide, there are often state programs that help pay the premiums and/or co-pays for people with limited income.

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Psychological Association Warns Against Blaming Mental Illness For Mass Shootings

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Mass shootings

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) issued a statement warning against blaming mental illness for all mass shootings. Following two major shootings this weekend, politicians, including the President of the United States, made statements about gun control and violence. Trump called the shooters “mentally ill monsters,” but the APA believes people with mental illness are being stigmatized.

Mass Shootings Doesn’t Equate Mental Illness

On Monday, Trump called for heavier mental health screenings. He stated that mental illness and hatred pull the trigger and even played with the idea of involuntary mental health treatment for some individuals.

“We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence,” he said, “and make sure those people, not only get treatment but when necessary, involuntary confinement.”

Many other members of the Republican party agreed with the president. Senator Chris Murphy, however, took to Twitter correcting POTUS.

The APA stated that “the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent and far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violence.” Anything saying otherwise, according to the association, can discourage people from getting the help they need. It can also embolden individuals with mental health issues to act violently.

Is There An Answer To Ending Gun Violence?

“The rates of mental illness are roughly the same around the world, yet other countries are not experiencing these traumatic events as often as we face them. One critical factor is access to, and the lethality of, the weapons that are being used in these crimes. Adding racism, intolerance and bigotry to the mix is a recipe for disaster,” Rosie Phillips David, president of the APA said.

So, while increasing mental health screenings for individuals purchasing guns may be a good idea, it won’t necessarily cut down on the number of mass shootings we see in a year. It is also unlikely to help cut down on other types of gun violence occurring in the country.

The only possible “fix” to the problem is reforming our laws surrounding firearms. All in all, further regulation is needed instead of placing blame where it simply does not belong.

Readers, what do you think about the APA’s warning against blaming mental illness for mass shootings? Is it accurate?

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Why Intermittent Fasting May Not Be Great For Your Health

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Intermittent fasting

The weight loss industry makes billions of dollars a year from Americans attempting to lose a few pounds. Some individuals have combated this billion-dollar industry with trying things like intermittent fasting. Of course, you’ll spend less money on food when you simply don’t eat for a certain period of time, but at what cost?

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting is something people do to increase their metabolism, lose weight, and possibly even reduce inflammation. To perform this type of fasting, you go without food for a set period of time every day. During this time, you can only drink water.

Many people fast for 16 hours and eat within an 8-hour window. So, if you start eating at 8 a.m., you’d only eat until 4 p.m. Then you’d fast again until 8 a.m. the next day.

Others use something called the 5:2 method. This means fives days out of the week you eat a normal number of calories. The other two days you have a restricted caloric intake (usually between 500 and 600 calories).

Dangers of Fasting

Billions of people worldwide fast for various reasons, including weight loss. However, many extreme diets or going without eating altogether can have some positive (and negative) impacts on your physical and mental health. More recently, the negative impacts of intermittent fasting have come to light.

Cons of Fasting

“Intermittent fasting is a gateway to an eating disorder,” Evelyn Tribole, registered dietitian and co-author of Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works stated. Oftentimes, when you get used to not eating, you just stop eating. Some individuals may fall into habits that lead to developing an eating disorder.

At the same time, those who don’t fall into anorexia may find themselves binge eating when they come off their fast. They may do really well for a few weeks, then when they stop their fasting period, they binge and gain the weight back, which can be just as harmful. Most importantly, you lose touch with your body’s ability to know when you need food and when you don’t.

On top of how intermittent fasting can change your relationship with food, it can also impact your social life. Many people who have done this type of fasting note that the social side effects were what almost broke them in the beginning. It is more difficult to go out with friends for a bite to eat when you don’t eat most of the day. Also, not all your friends and family will agree with you just not eating.

Pros of Fasting

That being said, there are plenty of benefits to intermittent fasting. Some individuals find that during periods of fasting they are able to think more clearly and feel happier. Additionally, most people who perform any type of fasting see some weight loss results, though they vary from person to person.

As with any extreme change in your lifestyle, be sure to consult with your physician before fasting or adopting any new diet.

Readers, have you tried intermittent fasting or any other kind of fasting? How did it impact you? 

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More Kids Are Being Placed in Foster Care Because of Drug Use

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Foster care

The opioid crisis could cost the United States more than $500 million over the next three years. Not to mention, it has already cost billions of dollars, plus lives. Now, more children are being placed in foster care because of this drug use.

Drug Use and Foster Care

The number of children being placed in foster care due to parental drug use has more than doubled in the last 20 years, a 147 percent increase, to be exact. A new study, which took a look at 5 million foster care cases, analyzed how many cases were due to parental drug use.

“A lot of the work out there [on the opioid epidemic] has focused on mortality and overdoses and how it affects adults,” said Angelica Meinhofer, lead author of the study. “[It’s] less known how the epidemic might spill over to children. And that’s something I’m trying to shed light on.”

Between 2000 and 2017, the rate of kids being removed from the home for abuse, neglect, or any other reason declined. However, the instances of children being removed because of drug use in the home increased from 15 percent to 36 percent during that period. Additionally, the children impacted by removal due to drug use are younger than kids removed for other reasons. Those removed for parental drug use were typically under the age of five.

Does This Have Anything to Do With The Opioid Epidemic?

Parental drug use was responsible for more than 1 million entries into the foster care system. That is 23 percent of all the children admitted to foster care during that period of time.

It is easy to tie the opioid epidemic into the increase. Meinhofer believes there may be other contributing factors that may help explain the upward trend. Drug use overall has increased during that period of time. Because of this, policies that increase child removal have changed and child social workers are asked to pay more attention to drug use. This, as well as other altered data collection, may have an impact on the findings.

“We hope our findings will provoke researchers to ask … what’s causing this growth, what are the implications of this growth and whether or not our system has to absorb the capacity of increasing foster care loads,” Meinhofer stated.

Is There a Solution?

For more than a decade, children in the foster care system were on the decline. Between 2012 and 2017, it began on this upward trend. During that period the number of foster care children in the system increase by 8 percent and opioid use was on the rise. But, separating children from their parents long-term through the foster care system is never optimal.

If social workers have a child removed from the home, one of the best things they could do is seek help for the drug-using parent(s). Certain special programs within the family drug court system help provide supervised treatment for substance abuse. They can help the parent(s) get clean and regain custody.

For now, Meinhofer and her colleagues are calling for follow-up studies which would take a better look at the cause of the increased drug use. This way, policymakers can better address the needs of the children.

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Change Your Mind to Change Your Money: Earning “Enough” Is a Matter of Perspective

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financially enough

The average North American never feels like they have quite enough money. There are always more bills to pay, more things to buy, or even more savings to set aside for later. The funny thing is, we always think that if we get just a certain amount more, then we’ll have “enough.”

But it never happens. If we reach the imaginary goal, the goal changes, an ever-shifting line in the sands of our financial perception. Is it possible to ever feel like we have enough? Yes. But the answer isn’t in a number. It’s all in our own perspective.

We Compare Ourselves Unfavorably to Others

There are many complex psychological and social reasons why we never feel like we have “enough.” According to a recent CBC Business News report, the leading factor causing us to feel inadequate about our money is the human brain’s tendency to compare ourselves to others. Our minds do this naturally when it comes to many different factors in life. We can’t help it. But when it comes to money, we are particularly vulnerable.

The problem is that we tend to only compare ourselves to those who have more than us. We don’t look at people who earn less than us and think, “oh, wow, I earn so much more than that person.” Instead, we look at those who earn more than us and long to have what they have. It’s a trick of the brain that leaves all of us vulnerable to constant feelings of financial inadequacy.

Comparing Ourselves to the Super Rich

Several things in modern times have made this problem worse. One of the biggest is the increasingly large gap between rich and poor. More specifically, there are people in the world who earn grotesquely large amounts of money. If you compare yourself to someone who has billions, then you’re always going to feel like you don’t have enough.

There is a persistent idea in our society than anyone can become super-rich. You can win a reality TV show and instantly get one million dollars. Or you can win the lottery. Or while still in your twenties, you can launch the next amazing start-up company. If you haven’t succeeded at attaining millions, or preferably billions, by mid-life, then society can make you feel like you’re failing.

The Problem of (Social) Media

The persistence of rich life imagery today exacerbates the problem. There are countless reality television shows devoted to showcasing the lives of the rich. Social media makes everyone lives look so much better than our own. Somewhere in our minds, we know that most people aren’t celebrities. We realize that people post their best days on social media and manipulate their images accordingly.

Nevertheless, our brains compare. We begin to believe that those people have amazing lives that are so much better than our own. Furthermore, we believe that if we got just a little bit more, then we would be happy as well.

Our Own Peer Group Doesn’t Help

Of course, the people we spend the most time with are usually our peers. They are our coworkers who earn salaries comparable to ours. They are the people who attend the same events as us, live in the neighborhoods that we do, send their children to the same schools. Clearly, we more or less must make the same amount of money as them. So why does it still feel like we need more?

The first reason is the age-old concept of feeling like we have to “keep up with the Joneses.” We see our neighbors spend more to upgrade their homes, so we do the same. Our friends post stunning vacation destination photos on their Instagram, and we pull out the credit card to book a similar trip. We don’t compare ourselves to our peers by what we each earn. In contrast, we make comparisons about what we perceive each other as spending. This leads to overspending, which ends up making us feel like we don’t have enough.

Humans Easily Adapt to New Circumstances

Comparisons to others aren’t the only problem. We face a lot of mental challenges to ever feeling like we truly have enough. For example, we’re prone to a phenomenon called Hedonic Adaptation. It’s a fancy term that basically means we quickly adjust to whatever we have. If you earn $50,000 per year, and that doesn’t feel like enough, then suddenly changing to a job where you earn $100,000 per year should feel abundant. It will – for a moment. But thanks to our brain’s ability to adapt, we’ll quickly go back to feeling the same way that we did before. We’ll adjust to a $100,000 income, and it won’t feel like enough. Likewise, if that doubles to $200,000 annually, it still won’t feel like enough. The initial surge will be awesome. Then it’ll fade. The same old feelings will come right back. We adapt, for better or worse.

The Only Answer is to Change Your Perception

If we can adapt to earning more, then couldn’t we also adapt to earning less? Yes. We see a variation on this when people have children. If you’re earning $50,000 per year as a single person, and someone asks you how you would afford kids, you might have no clue. But if you have a child, you make the money work. You may feel an initial financial strain, but ultimately, you basically mentally balance out where you were before. You have to spend more, you’re not earning any more, and yet you feel the same as you did before about your money.

How to Change Your Money Perception

This sounds terrible. How can we ever feel like we’re earning enough if no external circumstance can change our feelings? The answer is that we have to change our feelings from within. We have to alter our perspective in order to feel like we already have enough. Recognizing that there is no magic number that will suddenly feel satisfactory, we have to find ways to feel satisfied with exactly what amount of money we have right now. We must embrace an abundance mindset.

Here are some tips:

  • Get realistic about your finances. Figure out exactly what you earn and what you spend. Calculate what you need to save for emergencies and retirement. Then set about creating a plan to make that happen. This isn’t a “dream income” plan. It’s a plan for how to limit yourself to just what you actually need and then make a way to make your income suit that.
  • Stop comparing yourself to others. This is easier said than done. Opportunities to compare ourselves to others financially are all around us. It takes effort. But it’s the single best endeavor you can undertake if you want to start feeling like you have enough. Delete social media that makes you feel financially bad. Focus spending on your true needs, not what you “need” to match what others have. Stop watching the lives of others who seem to have more.
  • Embrace abundance. Use affirmations to remind yourself that what you have is already enough. Focus your time and energy on the non-financial things that give you joy. Change your language from “I need” to “I have.”
  • Try therapy. Money is one of the biggest issues in individual’s lives. It is also a primary cause for fights in relationships. We all have struggles with money. Work through those challenges at a deeper level to truly move past them. When you learn to feel like you are enough, you will also start to feel like you have enough.

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If You Want to Lose Weight, Cut 300 Calories a Day

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300 calories

People spend $60 billion every year trying to lose weight or alleviate medical issues cause by being overweight. New research has shown that cutting 300 calories a day can not only help you lose weight but also improve your heart health.

The Diet Industry

About 50 percent of Americans say they’re trying to lose weight right now. As mentioned above, billions of dollars are spent every year just to shed those extra pounds. Most of the time, the most expensive diet plans and foods don’t produce lasting results.

According to a new study, you may be wasting money on those diet books and foods. Save your money and just cut 300 calories a day from your regular diet.

Just 300 Calories a Day Can Make a Difference

Even if you’re at a healthy weight now, cutting those calories can also benefit your cardiovascular health too. Over the span of two years, individuals who lowered their overall caloric intake had lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol. They also saw a 24 percent decrease in triglycerides.

Additionally, participants lost an average of 16 pounds over the span of the study. Seventy-one percent of the weight loss was fat. Study authors say this shows that even the smallest changes can make a huge impact on your health.

Dr. William Kraus, the senior author of the study, stated, “Exercise and diet are the two most profound and easily implemented interventions we have in our environment that can reduce our cardiovascular risks. There aren’t five drugs on the market when combined that could approach what we saw in this study from moderate calorie restriction.”

Cutting 300 calories a day is extremely doable. You don’t have to make a huge change to your diet to make this happen. Three hundred calories could be cut by doing intermittent fasting or skipping dessert. With more than 610,000 people dying of heart disease every year, that’s a small price to pay.

Readers, have you tried a fad diet that turned out to be a flop? 

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