GoodRx Beats Insurance Copays 37% of the Time for Top Drugs
You have insurance, so you must be paying the lowest possible price for your prescription, right? Not exactly.
It may come as a surprise, but GoodRx coupons beat insurance a lot of the time. In fact, for the 100 most prescribed drugs, GoodRx users paid less than the average insurance copay 37% of the time, with savings up to 54%.
For many popular drugs — including prednisone (Sterapred, Deltasone), levothyroxine (Synthroid, Euthyrox), and metformin (Glucophage) — insurance copays are often higher than what people would pay with a discount from GoodRx. In effect, using insurance means you could end up paying quite a bit more out of pocket for your medications.
So, how do GoodRx discount prices compare to insurance copays for some popular drugs in the U.S.? The breakdown is shocking and reveals that even with insurance, many of us are likely overpaying for our prescriptions.
| Drug name | Average copay | Typical GoodRx price | Savings with GoodRx |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sildenafil (thirty 20 mg tablets) | $35.76 | $15.20 | $20.56 |
| Diclofenac sodium (100 g tube of gel) | $34.77 | $22.04 | $12.73 |
| Amoxicillin (100 ml bottle of suspension) | $22.67 | $11.31 | $11.36 |
| Omeprazole (thirty 20 mg capsules) | $13.34 | $3.36 | $9.98 |
| Ranitidine (sixty 150 mg tablets) | $19.12 | $9.57 | $9.55 |
| Synthroid (thirty 100 mcg tablets) | $50.76 | $42.21 | $8.55 |
| Prednisone (ten 20 mg tablets) | $12.03 | $4.26 | $7.77 |
| Estradiol (thirty 1 mg tablets) | $13.85 | $6.20 | $7.65 |
While copay prices can vary greatly, the surprise here is that insurance is often not the best price. In fact, with some drugs — like atorvastatin (Lipitor) and sildenafil (Viagra) — insurance copays can be 2 times more expensive than GoodRx discount prices.
If you use insurance to pay for one of these medications, there’s a good chance that GoodRx will beat your insurance copay. To get the lower GoodRx price, just tell your pharmacist you want to pay cash and then use a GoodRx coupon to complete your transaction. You can print out coupons from goodrx.com, email or text them to yourself, or access them on the GoodRx mobile app.
To take advantage of your insurance benefits and pay with a GoodRx coupon, you may want to file a claim for reimbursement to your insurance company or have them apply your cash payment against your deductible (if you have one). Here’s how to do that.
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Methodology:
This list is an analysis of GoodRx prices compared to a representative sample of copay charges for 406 commercial insurance plans. The “best GoodRx price” comes from claims based on the 20th percentile and doesn’t include cash or membership program prices.
Co-contributors: Jeroen Van Meijgaard, PhD
