Not much point if your main goal is to get prescriptions covered due to your income. The government will start kicking in for you and pay for the majority of your meds after you spend $400 in eligible meds anyways. If you spend $600 in a calendar year on eligible meds, your drugs are free for that year.
Fair PharmaCare Calculator
Register for fair pharmacare if you have not. It's free, you're eligible. If you don't need the coverage, you pay nothing. If you do, you pay about the same as blue cross anyways for the year.
If you need it for dental, that's another story.
There are many private plan carriers. Blue cross, Green shield, ESI, Assure Health (sunlife).
Assure health is a bitch as they are quite anal about every nit picky detail. Most of the time if you fill things normally, the deductions come off from the pharmacy and we're good. But if you need an emergency supply, they need you to manually submit that... if you need vacation supplies, manually submit that too... Blue cross doesn't do that... they don't really care...
That being said, I'm not sure how much the plans cost to buy privately.
Best bet I think would be either Blue Cross or ESI (manulife). Depending on how much the plans themselves cost. The dental or vision care benefits are always nice to have.
In general however, with regards to drugs:
Tell your doctor that you have cost concerns, or would prefer not to spend huge amounts on medications. And they usually can give you a couple different options of things to try. Sometimes there are cheaper options that may work about the same.
Talk to your pharmacist, they may be able to make suggestions if they know cost is an issue.
Sometimes taking half of a 20mg tablet is 50% less of the price than taking one of a 10mg tablet. There are some drugs where different strength tablets all cost the same.
Sometimes new generics may be available that they can bring in for you. Usually arrives next day, and you could save 50-60% even.
For example, If I see a prescription for a combination inhaler (that's not covered, and costs $120 bucks), and I know you have cost concerns. I could suggest splitting up the combination inhaler and give you 2 inhalers, one of each drug separately which IS covered.
But again, this depends on how good your pharmacist is at finding these cost savings strategies for you. They aren't obligated to do so as their main concern is the safety and effectiveness of the drug and also treating you to make you better. So they could just fill the prescription as it is, but if they know you or you're a nice guy they could go out of their way to help you out.
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