www.rxaminer.com, find a cheaper alternative, and see if your doctor will agree to prescribe the less-expensive drug.
With some medicines, you can get a double-strength dose at a similar price and cut the pills in half.
If you have access to a flexible spending plan at work, consider using that to pay your uninsured drug costs and copays with pretax dollars.
• Internet •
www.canadameds.com
www.rxaminer.com
* THE EMERGENCY ROOM *
The best way to save money on a visit to the emergency room is not to go. I’m not kidding.
In most large cities, you have the option of going to an emergency room or going to a “doc-in-the-box,” those small medical offices where you can walk in without an appointment. Unless you have an extremely serious medical emergency, you’ll do much better financially by going to a doc-in-the-box than an emergency room.
Emergency rooms are being swamped with patients, with maladies that range in severity from bumps and bruises to life-threatening injuries. As a result, the ERs are dysfunctional. Waits can be inordinately long and they’re very expensive. If you have a cold and you’re worried it might be something worse, you’re far better off going to a doc-in-the-box. They’re generally cheaper and you’ll be seen faster. It’s much less of a hassle.
Having said that, a visit to a doc-in-the-box may not be covered by your health plan, whereas visits to emergency rooms generally are covered, if you deem it to be an emergency. Under the law, if a reasonable person would consider it an emergency, you may go to the emergency room and get reimbursed for the care. You can figure out what to do by checking in advance to see how your health plan treats these kinds of situations.
I’m in an HMO, and it has a cooperative arrangement with some of the doc-in-the-boxes. So I pay the same amount for a visit there as I would to my HMO.
If your medical condition, or the medical condition of someone in your family, is truly serious, go to the emergency room. My co-author, Mark Meltzer, had to take his seventy-seven-year-old father, Morty, to the emergency room after a bad cold worsened. It was definitely the right call. Morty wound up spending two days in the hospital before he recovered.
If you do go to an emergency room, keep track of the bills you get and check to see what insurance pays and what you are responsible to pay. Don’t ever assume a single bill is the entire bill. You may have separate bills for the attending physician, and for radiology. After thirty days, find out from the hospital if there is anybody else who needs to be paid, because you must submit a timely claim to your insurance company.
I hear often from people who are having trouble with their credit because they neglected to pay a bill following a visit to an emergency room. Often it’s from a specialist or business allied with the emergency room (such as a radiologist or laboratory that might have done blood work) that might not have had your correct address. Ultimately, it ends up messing up your credit. So it’s up to you, a month later, to figure out who you might owe, and file a proper insurance claim.
CHAPTER 4
LEISURE
My mother used to tell me, “All work and no play makes Clark a dull boy.” I had so much ambition when I was younger that I never slowed down to enjoy things at all. But I’ve learned to take it easier. Now I take six weeks of vacation a year. During the other forty-six weeks I still work too much, but I do take time for myself.
While I believe in taking time for yourself, I also believe that spending too much money doesn’t make your leisure time any more enjoyable. You can have a lot of leisure activity in your life, yet do it at a very reasonable cost. It’s simply a matter of making minor changes, to spend less money. If you get a great bargain on a vacation trip, for example, you might save enough to pay for another trip. In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to save money on books;
With some medicines, you can get a double-strength dose at a similar price and cut the pills in half.
If you have access to a flexible spending plan at work, consider using that to pay your uninsured drug costs and copays with pretax dollars.
• Internet •
www.canadameds.com
www.rxaminer.com
* THE EMERGENCY ROOM *
The best way to save money on a visit to the emergency room is not to go. I’m not kidding.
In most large cities, you have the option of going to an emergency room or going to a “doc-in-the-box,” those small medical offices where you can walk in without an appointment. Unless you have an extremely serious medical emergency, you’ll do much better financially by going to a doc-in-the-box than an emergency room.
Emergency rooms are being swamped with patients, with maladies that range in severity from bumps and bruises to life-threatening injuries. As a result, the ERs are dysfunctional. Waits can be inordinately long and they’re very expensive. If you have a cold and you’re worried it might be something worse, you’re far better off going to a doc-in-the-box. They’re generally cheaper and you’ll be seen faster. It’s much less of a hassle.
Having said that, a visit to a doc-in-the-box may not be covered by your health plan, whereas visits to emergency rooms generally are covered, if you deem it to be an emergency. Under the law, if a reasonable person would consider it an emergency, you may go to the emergency room and get reimbursed for the care. You can figure out what to do by checking in advance to see how your health plan treats these kinds of situations.
I’m in an HMO, and it has a cooperative arrangement with some of the doc-in-the-boxes. So I pay the same amount for a visit there as I would to my HMO.
If your medical condition, or the medical condition of someone in your family, is truly serious, go to the emergency room. My co-author, Mark Meltzer, had to take his seventy-seven-year-old father, Morty, to the emergency room after a bad cold worsened. It was definitely the right call. Morty wound up spending two days in the hospital before he recovered.
If you do go to an emergency room, keep track of the bills you get and check to see what insurance pays and what you are responsible to pay. Don’t ever assume a single bill is the entire bill. You may have separate bills for the attending physician, and for radiology. After thirty days, find out from the hospital if there is anybody else who needs to be paid, because you must submit a timely claim to your insurance company.
I hear often from people who are having trouble with their credit because they neglected to pay a bill following a visit to an emergency room. Often it’s from a specialist or business allied with the emergency room (such as a radiologist or laboratory that might have done blood work) that might not have had your correct address. Ultimately, it ends up messing up your credit. So it’s up to you, a month later, to figure out who you might owe, and file a proper insurance claim.
CHAPTER 4
LEISURE
My mother used to tell me, “All work and no play makes Clark a dull boy.” I had so much ambition when I was younger that I never slowed down to enjoy things at all. But I’ve learned to take it easier. Now I take six weeks of vacation a year. During the other forty-six weeks I still work too much, but I do take time for myself.
While I believe in taking time for yourself, I also believe that spending too much money doesn’t make your leisure time any more enjoyable. You can have a lot of leisure activity in your life, yet do it at a very reasonable cost. It’s simply a matter of making minor changes, to spend less money. If you get a great bargain on a vacation trip, for example, you might save enough to pay for another trip. In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to save money on books;
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