The Walmart announcement is a welcome enough one, if it survives the test market and spreads. The generic drugs for which the $4 per 30-day prescription will apply are only 291 of about 1800 generics commonly prescribed, so it's really only a small start.

The real "gotcha" is that many insurance plans require a co-pay for each prescription, commonly in the $5 to $20 range, and as implemented by many dispensers and insurance companies (e.g. in particular, for our account, by Merck-Medco) you may still pay the fixed copay even if the copay is more than the uninsured price of the drug.

In this case, of course, you should just pay for the drug without filing a claim from the insurer; but this often means you must know in advance, before submitting your prescription to a pharmacy, what the cost will be under multiple options; and it's really tough to keep your prescriptions separated once you start dealing with more than one pharmacy and more than one method of payment.

It doesn't help that most prescribing physicians don't have the foggiest notion of the cost/price of the drugs they prescribe, and frequently are unaware whether generic alternates are available for the meds the drug company reps are pushing at any given time.

An agile and alert mind and good accounting skills are necessary for (esp.) oldsters to survive all this.

John