The Hidden Price of Not Shopping for Healthcare

When Clark Howard's wife loaded a sectional into an online shopping cart over Labor Day and then abandoned it, she wasn't trying to game the system. She just wasn't ready to spend the money. A day later, the retailer emailed her an additional 15 percent off plus free delivery. She bought it. That accidental strategy—loading items and walking away—is one of the few genuinely effective tools against the impulse buying that has become dangerously easy in an era of endless sale alerts and one-click purchasing. But the bigger lesson, and the one that can save far more money, is that the same principle of shopping around applies to healthcare, where the stakes are life-and-death and the price differences can be measured in thousands of dollars per month.

The Canadian Drug Pipeline Is Being Cut Off

For Americans who depend on expensive brand-name prescription drugs with no generic alternative, one of the few relief valves has been ordering identical medications from Canadian pharmacies by mail. The same drug that costs thousands of dollars per month in the United States can be purchased from Canada for a fraction of the price. But the U.S. government has recently moved to choke off mail-order access, forcing patients to either pay the inflated domestic price or go without.