RX Health Matters: Comparing prices on prescriptions may save you money

For 4 years, Chad Merrill has been a pharmacist at Mike’s Pharmacy in Idaho Falls. He says ever since his dad opened the family business back in 1985, they always try to treat their customers like family.

“We really like to treat people like they’re people instead of, hey, just a prescription,” said Merrill. “We really enjoy interacting with these people and calling them by name when they walk through the door, saying hello, asking them how they’re doing. That’s probably the best part of our job.”

Merrill said one of the biggest challenges he faces is the growing cost of medications.

“Unfortunately, the pharmacy is kind of the last stop in the health care model. So we end up dealing with some unfortunate things, and some people are just fed up by the time they get to us. And that’s tough. By the time they hit the doctor, pay the co-pay, and do all that, it trickles down to us and prescriptions are expensive,” said Merrill.

“They’re expensive for us to get and that moves on to customers, whether insurance will pay for it, whether they’ll have to come up with the money. That’s probably the number one concern with people,” said Merrill.

Which is why Merrill said they do their best to help people out when their medications end up costing a fortune.

“If they say, oh, that’s too expensive for me, we can call the doctor to see if there’s something else that’s therapeutically similar and get it switched over to something that would help them out at a reasonable cost,” Merrill said.

“The other thing is we do compound. We mix up medications for specific medications and that’s something manufacturers have a hard time doing is they have to generalize those medications for everybody where we can tailor the medication directly to these people,” he said.

One of the things you can do to avoid sticker shock at your local pharmacy is using our new online tool.

Go to our RX Health Matters page. Then scroll down. You’ll see on the right side of the page a GoodRX section. That’s where you can enter in the name of your medicine and your zip code, to see how much it’ll cost you at the major pharmacies in your neighborhood. But sometimes your medication will cost you an arm and a leg.

Merrill says he’s grateful most of his customers understand that it’s the drug makers who set the prices. “We try to put our prices best we can to stay in business. But we also want to take care of our customers and not gouge them in any way,” he said.