The costs of medications, prescriptions and pills are skyrocketing as the year end profits of health care companies continue to set records. It’s a pretty awful picture, even for people with insurance. For those who have no kind of health coverage to fall back on that image is even more dismal though. Hefty co pays and insurance premiums can eat away literally hundreds of dollars from a family’s monthly income. With medicine becoming more and more expensive and no end to the price hikes in sight, there must be ways to buy medicine cheap and get some sort of deals on all those prescriptions.

Insurance Coverage

Naturally, having some kind of insurance coverage is the ideal case for most families. However, health insurance isn’t cheap – it’s actually one of the most expensive bills the average family faces during a month, right behind rent, utilities, food, gasoline… the list is quite long. If you’re in one of those families which can afford decent health coverage then you’re in luck, really. The majority of people in this country aren’t. These days, even if you have the money to pay for a good policy, insurance companies are turning down everyone for everything and it’s getting more and more difficult to sign up with a quality company.

Manufacturer’s Coupons

For people who don’t have insurance to help them cover the cost of medicine, there are some ways to get the prescriptions and pills you need for less than you might be paying now. Drug companies often offer coupons and other special offers to consumers. However, to get these offers, you usually need to go sign up for a mailing list on the drug manufacturer’s website and hand over some personal information like an email address and other ways to contact you. 10, 20, 30% or more off the cost of a month’s worth of medicine can come in handy for just about anyone, there’s no doubt about that. Any opportunity to buy medicine cheap is usually appreciated.

Those savings aren’t exactly extensive and they don’t tend to last a long time, either; just a little break a few times throughout the year. Instead of signing up for mailing lists and giving out your personal information, you could save a lot of money on your medicine while getting the same quality ingredients by doing something else. Switching to generic drugs might not seem like a good idea but many people tend to think of generic drugs like generic food and drinks and if there was ever a bad correlation made, this is definitely it.

Go Generic

While we’ve probably all had food which tasted off or wasn’t as good as the name brands we really like, drugs are much different from food. They might be monitored by the same Food and Drug Administration but while the ingredients in food can and will vary from producer to producer, medicines must contain whatever is described on the label. There are literally hundreds of different drug companies producing ibuprofen but regardless of what name is on the box, a 200 mg tablet is a 200 mg tablet and each of those ibuprofen brands is essentially as effective as the other.

More importantly, the generic brands are every bit as effective as the big name brands too. In almost every family which needs some drug or another on a regular basis, there is great potential to save money by switching over to generic brands. It’s really one of the only ways to get drugs for less if you don’t already have an insurance policy behind you or some other safety net beneath you when things take a turn for the worse in your life. While we’re all naturally hopeful that we won’t be the ones to face some tragedy, life has proven time and time again that it does not play fair.

Get Into a Prescription Discount Club

Sometimes there is no generic brand available for a particular drug. Some companies get such powerful patents on their proprietary concoctions that nobody else can even produce something similar for fear of being sued out of existence. If you happen to be stuck with a medication such as this, there are still ways for you to buy medicine cheap. Discount programs which are not insurance do exist – you’ve probably already received some sort of prescription discount card in the mail previously.

While they might not have the same power as an insurance company, pooling tens of thousands or more people into the same group can still mean saving on drugs for all the members of that group. Usually these programs are free too; they’re just a way to make it so people aren’t looking for drugs alone, but more like if they were part of a package deal which included 100,000 people. It’s not exactly a great alternative to insurance but for those with nothing else to rely on, it’s certainly better than nothing. Programs such as these do cut down on the cost of medication so they shouldn’t be dismissed as useless.