High blood pressure affects quite a few people, so here’s a story about saving money on prescriptions that treat high blood pressure.
Ms. R has high blood pressure, also known as hypertension. She is being treated with an expensive brand name medication, Toprol XL, which costs about $47 per month. Toprol XL is now available as a generic.
Good news for Ms. R. But some of you may not know that when a generic is new, it can often be almost as expensive as the brand-name version of the medication. This was the case with the generic medication for Torpol XL.
Ms. R found out that there is another form of this medicine that is used to treat high blood pressure with two-times-a-day dosages. This drug was called metoprolol and it was still on the market and available as a generic medication, but it’s older than Toprol XL and short-acting. But Ms. R decided the inconvenience of taking the older, short-acting medication twice a day was worth it… since she would save almost $500 a year. For most people, when they see the savings (especially a large savings like Ms. R’s), it is not too inconvenient to take two pills a day instead of one.
