In response to the high price of prescription drugs, “An Arm and a Leg” asked listeners to share their strategies for getting the medicine they need at prices they can manage.
Host Dan Weissmann and producers Emily Pisacreta and Claire Davenport share tips from a retired hospital manager who now helps seniors find the right Medicare plans, a pharmaceutical sales rep, an employee benefits adviser, and a battle-worn hospital caseworker. Each brings surprising, maybe even lifesaving, information to the table.
Explore the full crowdsourced series, including five installments of the “First Aid Kit” newsletter: The Prescription Drug Playbook.
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Transcript: The Prescription Drug Playbook, Part II
Note: “An Arm and a Leg” uses speech-recognition software to generate transcripts, which may contain errors. Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast.
Dan: Hey there. Let’s meet Jeanne Chamberlin from North Carolina. She regularly talks with folks who take like 15 different meds every day.
Jeanne Chamberlin: You are like, oh my gosh. And literally the retail costs are $20,000 a month.
Dan: Jeanne’s an expert, twice over. Since retiring from a career managing hospitals and medical groups, she’s been helping her fellow seniors figure out how to manage what they pay for health care — as a county-level volunteer coordinator for a program called SHIP.
Jeanne: And SHIP stands for Seniors Health Insurance Information Program.
Dan: Actually in some cases it stands for State Health Insurance Assistance Program.
Whatever you wanna call it — It’s a federally funded program that helps seniors with all things Medicare. Every state has its own version of SHIP.
During the busy season — that’s in the fall, when people can pick new insurance for the coming year– Jeanne says she and her team speak to more than a hundred people a week.
And one thing that comes up …