@acemindbreaker, I didn’t want to directly reblog this thread (there were some pretty pressuring bits in previous parts of the reblog chain, and I follow a no-guilt-trips policy), but I did want to try and answer your question.
You live in Saskatchewan, right? It looks like this is Saskatchewan’s version of the medication assistance program my family’s on.
IIRC, the Ontarian program specifies that to qualify for it your household must spend more than 4% of its collective income on prescription meds†, and the program acts to cap your spending at 4% of income (each quarter you only pay up to that figure, and then the program kicks in and pays for the rest of your meds that quarter). The Saskatchewan page seems rather more vague about what its qualifiers and effects are, but the information might be buried in there somewhere, and presumably it has *some* effect for *some* people.
—
I was not involved in the decision to make No Frills our primary pharmacy (it was a while ago), but I assume my parents had their reasons to switch over from Pharmasave, and they were probably financial reasons. The No Frills website says there are only three of them in all of SK, so you might very well not live near one, but the general idea might hold. I don’t know what websites might help you in determining which pharmacies are cheaper than others, though: search listings seem to be clogged with places trying to smuggle(?) Canadian meds into the United States.
—
(And the smuggling brings up something that may be worth noting, that in some cases the efforts of Americans to get cheaper meds are just trying to bring prices down to a level Canadians would consider full price, and to some extent the reason there is less Canadians can do is because there is less to be done. I still remember, shortly after we moved, how horrified our new friends were when they heard what my parents had been paying for their medications. But I don’t want to put too much emphasis on that: even when things are better than they *could* be, it’s often important to try to make them better still.)
—
†so I suspect we’re going to get kicked out at the next assessment now that we’re making more, but anyway
Tags:
#this post technically qualifies as: #oh look an original post #but is closer to the spirit of: #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 