A free discount card for prescription medications comes at a good time for many Lincoln County citizens struggling during the current economic climate.
Lincoln County offers residents the card, which they can pick up at their local town offices or at the county office in Wiscasset.
According to Debbie Tibbetts, deputy Lincoln County administrator, the county office has plenty of cards available for town offices that may have run out of them by now.
“Not many towns have picked up more from the county,” said “It should be a great help for people with all the expenses they face.
County commissioners first decided to accept the responsibility of sponsoring and distributing the cards last October at the suggestion of former county administrator Jim McMahon.
“As a former municipal officer and town manager/general assistance administrator myself, I feel this could be a useful tool for municipalities and also provide a helpful assist for many of your citizens,” McMahon told the board.
An estimated 46 million Americans nationwide do not have and cannot afford medical insurance, so the county wanted to provide cards for citizens at no cost to them or the county either. The uninsured particularly should benefit from the free cards, Tibbetts said.
The ones who could use the cards the most, the hard working poor who are proud individuals, typically pay the highest retail costs for medications, according to a report on the cards.
“This new drug card is not a panacea to be sure, but considering the hard economic times we are experiencing, the commissioners and I feel that every available assist to our municipalities and their citizens can help,” McMahon said last fall.
Insured patients can also benefit from the cards as Commissioner Sheridan Bond attests. Bond said people have spoken about how the cards have helped them.
“A lot of people said they were able to buy drugs they would not have been able to buy otherwise,” he said. “In some cases the discount card affords even insured people an option that might be better than through their insurance.”
Literature regarding the cards states that an insured person may not be getting the best price, and advises insured people to give their pharmacist both the discount and insurance card to find out the better deal for them.
Another group of citizens who could benefit much from the cards are disaster victims. Typically insurance companies will not pay twice for prescriptions that have been dispensed by a pharmacy for a patient whose prescriptions have been lost or destroyed regardless of the reason. Some insurance companies will allow advance prescription purchases to be offset later in normal dosing limit requirements but will not pay for the same prescription twice. The cards could help in such situation, according to the county information.
Medicare patients make up another category benefiting from the cards. They are seniors who are in their high deductible accumulation periods and/or patients who are in the donut holes of no coverage under their Medicare D plans.
Patients who have high co-pays, specific drug exclusions, and/or the patient who needs more dosage than the plan allows may benefit from the cards. Typically patients are required to pay 100 percent of the actual cost of the prescription with cash at the pharmacy.
