HOUSTON – At 55-years-old, Tina Wood of Houston starts every morning the same way, taking her medicines.
It’s a regimen of eight different prescription drugs she has to have.
Medications like progesterone for menopause, methimazole for a thyroid condition and clonidine for high blood pressure.
Drugs that just keep getting more and more expensive.
“They are astronomical, I think they are high and going even higher in price. Sometimes you have to make a choice, I mean are you going to eat or get the medicine,” Tina says.
This story comes from KSAT sister station KPRC
Now enter two brothers from right here in Houston, Paul and Stephen Thomas.
These two mavericks in the prescription drug world have created a company called RefillWise.
Their product is a free, prescription drug, discount card that could save your family hundreds of dollars.
“Our average savings for the average consumer is around 40 percent... sometimes we can save consumers even more, up to 80 percent, sometimes it’s less”, says Paul Thomas, CEO of RefillWise.
How can these two Texas brothers do it, slash the price of prescription drugs?
Simply put, by negotiating from a position of strength, based on the number of members who use RefillWise.
“What you do is you go out and get a large group of people like we have on RefillWise. That’s a million folks. Then you go to the pharmacies and say ‘Hey pharmacies, we have got a lot of people, so give us managed-care-level-discounts for all those folks,” Thomas says.
Now joining RefillWise is free and costs consumers nothing.
You can sign up by going to www.refillwise.com.
Or, a far faster way, is to just text the word join to 22822 on your smartphone and your new RefillWise discount card is texted right back to you on your phone.
Now, it’s on your phone and you can show it to the pharmacist where you shop.
RefillWise will even give you a $5 cash back reward on your first purchase.
Then you earn more $5 rewards for every 10 purchases of prescription drugs you make using RefillWise.
As for Tina, who has struggled to pay for her prescriptions in the past, a woman who actually debated trying to do without her medicines to keep from draining her bank account, she has now been using RefillWise for two full years.
Asked how much she has been able to save, she speaks right up.
“I’ve saved approximately $146.90 for my medicines … that’s every 30 days,” Tina said. “That kind of savings will actually pay for a couple of my prescriptions outright.”
Add that up and it amounts to more than $1,700 a year.
“I think it’s good, I think people should try it and save a little,” Tina says.
