Schenectady County residents who receive a piece of mail from the county and ProAct in the next couple of days shouldn’t mistake it for junk. Enclosed is a prescription drug discount card.
If you’re maybe insured but don’t have drug coverage, if you’re a senior and fall within this Medicare gap, then this card is great for you, said Joe McQueen, director of public communications for Schenectady County
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The cards will provide discounts of 10 percent to 50 percent off prescription drugs, and any resident can use it in any participating pharmacy in the county.
The card is completely free and doesn’t track prescriptions a cardholder buys. There are no names on the card, and if it’s lost, the county and pharmacies can provide replacements at no extra cost.
While the card is for everyone, it might be specifically helpful to residents who participate in the Medicare Part D program. The program is for senior citizens who do not have some kind of supplemental coverage for their medications already. It helps reduce the amount they spend on pills, and in some cases, covers the cost all together. The program covers 75 percent of prescription costs above $250 a year, and 25 percent of the costs from $250 to $2,250.
However, there’s a loophole for participants whose drug costs total more than $2,250 and less than $5,100.
According to McQueen, once a senior citizen participating in the program hits the threshold of $2,250, they have to pay out of pocket until they hit the next threshold of $5,100, in which case medications are covered completely.
`If you’re on a fixed income and you’re 70 and you have medications you have to take, that can be a lot,` said McQueen.
The drug discount card can theoretically save someone paying $4,000 out of pocket for his or her medications up to $2,000 per year.
The new prescription drug card is hitting close to home for Schenectady County Legislator Karen Johnson, D-Schenectady.
`Not everyone is on a lot of medications, but I happen to be, so I’ve had direct experience with this,` said Johnson. `I just had to pay it. We haven’t field-tested this, but the theory is that a person who has no insurance can go into a pharmacist, tell them exactly what drugs they’re taking, and the pharmacist will tell them the discount they’re going to receive.`
However, the program helps more than the people who are on Medicaid.
`Many companies, especially smaller companies, have been reducing their insurance coverage, which might mean there are people who have health insurance but don’t have pharmacy coverage,` said Johnson.
`We know there are a lot of people who don’t have coverage at all or they may not be working full-time,` said Johnson.
She said that the expectation in Schenectady County, `where we have a high proportion of elderly and a pretty high proportion of low-income people and there are a lot of people who are just in a squeeze,` is that this card might be of help to them.
Currently there are 13 counties in New York participating in this specific program with ProAct. The nearest county to Schenectady that participates is Fulton County.
`Basically the ProAct company is a drug benefits company,` said McQueen.
`They’re looking to increase volume. The more that their people under them buy from pharmaceutical companies, they get better prices for volume. The CVS’s the Rite Aid’s, the Hannaford’s, the Price Chopper’s ` it’s driving traffic into the stores,` said McQueen of the drug discount card.
He said that it’s not as much about making money on the drugs but about getting traffic into the stores.
Johnson wants residents to take advantage of the program.
`I think this is potentially a great service to our constituents, and I just hope that they’ll take advantage of it because there are many things in our lives that we can take advantage of, and we either don’t know about it or don’t do it,` said Johnson.
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