Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Tutorial
by KKQ
prev Page 9
Medicare Tutorial Home
Summary
Here's a summary of the steps to find a Medicare Prescription Drug Plan:
Go to the government's website: www.medicare.gov
Select "Compare Medicare Prescription Drug Plans".
Select "Find a Medicare Prescription Drug Plan".
Scroll down to the "B" section, "General Plan Search".
Select the "General Search".
Type in your zipcode.
Second, indicate your current drug coverage. I selected "None of the above".
Third, indicate if you are eligible or qualifying for additional help. I selected "No".
Finally, select "Continue" at the bottom of the page.
Select "Choose a Drug Plan Type".
Scroll down the page to find the "C. Medicare Prescription Drug Plans".
I did not check the box "Also include Medicare Advantage and Other Medicare Health Plans".
Now select "Search for Medicare Prescription Drug Plans".
Scroll down to "B. Enter your medications".
Select "Enter my medications".
You can now begin typing in your medications.
As you enter your drugs you will see your list under "B. Review your drug list".
After you have entered all of your drugs, make sure that "Use lower cost generic drugs when available" is not selected, unless you want it to be.
Then select "Continue with Selected Drugs".
Which will take you to the bottom of the page, "C. Choose how you want to view your plans."
I chose "Yes: Choose My Drug Dosage". I did this because I wanted to make sure that all of the drugs were covered. One of my Dad's drugs was available in an injection form, and he takes tablets, so I wanted to be able to indicate the correct form by choosing, and thus making sure that it was indeed on the companies formularies.
Now you'll want to be very specific about your drugs. You'll want to put down the strength first. Don't bother to update the 30-day quantity yet. Each time you change the drug name AND the quantity the system gets rid of the quantity changes. It's sort of a pain, but just go through first and do the strength of all drugs.
Second, now update the amount taken per month.
Type all of them at once, and select "Update Dosage/Quantity".
Now select "Continue with Selected Drugs".
You can continue by selecting your pharmacy by going into the "Yes: Select my Preferred Pharmacy", or select "No: Continue to Plan List". I selected "No" for this exercise. When I did it for my Dad I selected his current pharmacy. The nice thing about this program is that regardless of what you put in at this point you can change it on the following screens at any time. If you select "No" you will receive an average of costs for the pharmacies in your area. (This was based on the zipcode you entered at the beginning of the process).
Now you've finally arrived at the list of plans
available to you. They are listed in a table entitled
"Prescription Drug Plan Comparison".
The table is sorted by premium, with the lowest premiums appearing at the top of the list. The number of plans shown defaults to 5 per page, but you can scroll down to the bottom of the table and select "All" from the drop down box to see all of them.
If you continue scrolling past the plans list you will see the section entitled "Selected Pharmacies". Since I had not selected a pharmacy it shows this. Below this section you see all of your selected drugs.
I'm not exactly sure how the government came up with the Estimated Annual Cost column, since I didn't select a pharmacy. But go ahead and select "Change Pharmacy Selection".
It says you can select up to 3 pharmacies, but when I do that I really don't see the advantage to doing it.
I just select one at a time, being very systematic, so that I can compare the Estimated drug costs, depending on the pharmacy. When I did this for my Dad my costs varied, as well as which plans had the best costs.
I selected Walmart first.
Then select "Continue with Selected Pharmacies".
Now my Prescription Drug Plan Comparison will show the Esimated Annual Costs for each plan using Walmart's pharmacy pricing.
To change to another pharmacy, scroll down to Select "Change Pharmacy Selection".
Select "Remove" in the "Currently Selected" section, and then scroll down the list to your next choice.
Continue doing this until you've seen the costs for all the pharmacies you are interested in.
Once you have seen all the pricing for the pharmacies you are interested in, you can then select the most cost effective pharmacy, and then the most cost effective plan.
You can compare specific plans by selecting them in the Prescription Drug Plan Comparison Table.
Then select "Compare up to 3 Plans".
Which will then give you a side by side comparison of those plans.
Return to browsing plans by selecting "Return to Personalized Plan list".
To see more specific information about a plan, select the plan name.
This will bring up a more detailed information page, which includes the phone number of the company.
Final note:
I hope that this helps you in some way to come up with the most cost effective Medicare Prescription Drug Plan.
Good Luck,
Kim
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