Medicare helps you compare drug plans

Medicare will help you compare drug plans and their costs for your specific medications.

Just click on the headline to go to the Medicare site.

You have about six weeks to make up your mind for 2008.

The drug plans are specific to your zip code.

I ran mine through and found this out:

1. The cheapest drug cost for the prescriptions I use for a full year is

$2,111.16

Remember, that includes the premiums that you would pay. So far, under the BJ-encouraged Aetna Medicare Advantage plan, we pay NO premiums. So far. If we have to start paying premiums, then other plans might be less expensive for us.

2. My true out of pocket costs under the Aetna Medicare Advantage plan for 11 months is

$ 1,722.56

Pro-rated for 12 months, the Aetna plan total would be

$ 1,879.16

3. Unless I'm missing something, the Aetna plan, as long as the premiums are paid by the BJ and not by me, would be this much cheaper than the cheapest plan on the Medicare site (and, remember, this is only for drugs; the Aetna plan also pays through Medicare for other medical care)

$ 232

All of us will come up with different answers, depending on which drugs we use. My Celebrex, for example, because there is no generic, would be $101.52 a month under the Medicare site's cheapest plan. And my Urotral, for the same reason, would be $74.42 a month under the Medicare site's cheapest plan. The others are generics so there's little cost involved, even after I hit the donut hole.

But click on the headline and check it out. You have nothing to lose by looking.

Maybe Tom Moore can give some details on his costs, since Tom has the Summa plan, and pays premiums for it, so his savings have to offset his premium costs to be cheaper than through the BJ/Aetna plan. Or maybe Tom would run his prescriptions through the plans on the Medicare web site, to see if he can do it cheaper there or with Aetna.

We're all in this together and the more accurate information we can give each other the better off we'll all be.