Does Switching Pharmacies Make Sense for Your Family?

Start with the bottles

Before you read any further, go gather up your family’s prescriptions. The ones in the kitchen cabinet, the one on your nightstand, the chewables your kid takes for allergies, and the thyroid pill your mom takes if you’re the one keeping track of her refills these days. Line them all up on the counter.

That pile is the whole question. Whether these prescriptions for these people, would cost you less money, less time, and less hassle here than wherever they’re filled now.

What typical family actually pays at Qual-i-tee Pharmacy

Our prices are posted and fall into one of four tiers. The lowest tier is $13 for a one-month supply or $30 for three months, and it covers the most common prescriptions people take:

• Atorvastatin and rosuvastatin
• Lisinopril, losartan, amlodipine, and metoprolol
• Metformin
• Levothyroxine, in every strength we carry
• Sertraline, escitalopram, fluoxetine, and trazodone
• Omeprazole and pantoprazole
• Montelukast, including the 4 mg and 5 mg chewables for kids
• Cetirizine

So picture a household that looks like a lot of the ones we see at the counter. One parent takes atorvastatin and lisinopril, the other takes levothyroxine, and a kid takes montelukast chewables for seasonal allergies. That’s four prescriptions at $13 apiece, which comes to $52 a month for the whole family, or $120 for three months if you go with 90-day supplies.

Now pull out the receipts from your current pharmacy and look at what you paid. If each of those was a $15 or $20 copay, you’re already spending more than our posted price, and you’re going through your insurance to do it. If you’re on a high-deductible plan and haven’t hit the deductible yet, you’ve probably been paying the pharmacy’s cash price, which for these medications is often far more than what we charge.

Write your number down next to ours. That’s the money comparison, and if one of your medications isn’t in the list above, you can look it up here in about thirty seconds.

Now, count the trips

Money is the easy part to add up. The harder part, and the part families tend to underestimate, is the time.

Think about how your current pharmacy actually fits into your month. Four prescriptions that come due on four different days means four trips, or four times you meant to go and didn’t. Each one involves a drive, a line, and a fair chance of hearing “it’s not ready yet, give us twenty minutes,” which turns into forty while you wander the aisles. If something needs a refill authorization, add a few days of calling the clinic, calling the pharmacy, and calling the clinic again to find out why nobody heard from anybody.

Here’s how that goes for the same family at our pharmacy. We match everything in the house to come due on the same day, so there’s one trip a month instead of four. Once you’re set up, we work ahead to to make sure the prescriptions are ready when you get here.

The part nobody puts on a receipt…

There’s a kind of low-grade stress that comes with the way most pharmacies work now, and you only notice it once it’s gone.

It’s the phone tree, the hold music, the automated voice asking you to say your date of birth, the surprises at the register.

Here, the price is posted before you walk in, and if it ever changes, you hear it from a person before we fill anything. When you call, a pharmacist picks up. If you have a question about an interaction, a side effect, or whether a generic is really the same thing, you ask the person who filled it and get a real answer on the spot. None of that shows up as a dollar figure, but ask anyone who’s switched and it’s the thing they mention first.

There’s one more thing we do that changes a household more than any of the above, and it doesn’t cost anything either.

What free pouch packaging is actually worth

If anyone in your family takes more than two or three medications or supplements a day, this is the most important part. Instead of a row of bottles and a plastic organizer someone has to fill every Sunday, we sort every dose into small pouches, each one printed with the name, the date, and the time it’s meant to be taken. Morning pouch, evening pouch, bedtime pouch. You tear one off the roll and you’re done. A pharmacist checks every pouch before it leaves the counter, and the whole month’s worth comes home in a single box that fits on a shelf.

This is more than taking something off your plate. It makes medication easier to take. Nobody is counting pills at the kitchen table. Nobody is squinting at a bottle trying to remember whether the blood pressure pill is once a day or twice. If you’re traveling, you tear off a week and go.

For adult children managing a parent’s medications, it’s usually the thing that lets them stop hovering. Mom knows she took Tuesday morning because the Tuesday morning pouch is gone, and you know it too without having to call and ask. Missed doses and doubled doses, the two most common mistakes with a weekly organizer, mostly stop happening.

Most pharmacies either don’t offer this or route it through a mail-order service with a week’s lead time. We do it at no charge, for anyone who wants it, with the pharmacist who filled the prescriptions standing right there if you have a question about any of them. Bring in the bottles, we’ll review everything, build the first box, and sync the refills so the whole household picks up once a month.

Learn more about free pouch packaging

When switching doesn’t make sense

Sometimes, we’re not the best option.

If you’ve already met your deductible this year, your insurance is probably covering most of the cost from here on out. Purchases you make directly with us don’t count toward your deductible, so if you’re looking at a year of big medical bills, that’s worth a moment of thought.

And if someone in your family takes an expensive brand-name or biologic medication, your insurance plan is almost certainly the better deal on that one. Our model works best for generics, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

The good news is that none of this has to be all or nothing. Plenty of people keep their insurance for doctors, hospitals, and the one pricey prescription, and pay us directly for the inexpensive ones. Bring us your list and we’ll tell you which prescriptions make sense to fill here and which ones you should leave where they are.

How to switch

We need three things from you: your name, your phone number, and the name of the pharmacy you’re using now.

You can fill out the transfer form or call us at (608) 286-2625. A pharmacist will call to confirm the details, and then we handle the whole conversation with your old pharmacy, hold music included. Most transfers are finished the same day. Any refills left on your prescriptions come with them, and if something’s run out, we’ll contact your clinic for a new one.

One thing worth knowing: we don’t bill insurance for anything except Medicare Part B for vaccines. So if you’re on Medicare and come in for a flu or COVID shot, we’ll ask for your card and the shot is free to you. Everyone else pays our posted vaccine price.

We’re at 3304 University Avenue, between Duck Donuts and AT&T. Bring the bottles.