Drugs are more expensive than you can imagine. What you pay at your local pharmacy is just a fraction of the cost of the medication. There are pills that are literally 4,000 dollars a month if they are purchased with cash alone. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry and it’s costing you a fortune. The more sick you are the less money you have and there is no way around that. If you can believe it, there are people who are on over two dozen daily medications and without the help of insurance they wouldn’t be able to afford the drugs they are taking. But just like auto insurance, everyone needs to be covered.

That might be all well and true but that certainly doesn’t ease the pain of the amount that people are paying for prescription drugs, especially seniors on the infamous Medicare Part D program. It’s a program that can save seniors a ton of money on their drugs even though it doesn’t always feel that way. The reason that it often leaves a bad taste in your mouth is because of something those in the business call the donut hole.

The way it works is that for a certain period, and up to a certain dollar amount, Medicare simply pays most of the drug costs, leaving the patient with a fixed co-pay depending on the class of medication they are getting. Once the patient has acquired a certain amount of medication that Medicare has paid for, the tables are turned and the patient is made to pay a larger portion of the medicine costs. Depending on the medicine, this could equate to hundreds of dollars a month and leave those on a fixed income scrambling to pay for them. But without Medicare Part D they would be paying a lot more in the long run.