Frugal Flop: My Husband’s Prescription Medicine

Since I don’t work for a health institution, I don’t have to worry about HIPAA laws and am able to tell you that my husband has high cholesterol for which he takes medication everyday. This medicine is not cheap and when I worked my awesome job provided us with great insurance and our copay was minimal.
Since I stopped working and now we are under the high deductible plan his company provide, we have to pay for this medicine out of pocket until our family deductible ($2,500) is reached. Last year, we were able to save a ton of money on this prescription medicine because the doctor provided him with enough samples to last him a few months.
When we were about to run out of the samples I asked hubby to ask his doctor if he could use any of the generics available out there. If he could, our monthly costs would go down from $75 to $8. His doctor agreed on a test basis. After two months on the medicine, his cholesterol was a bit higher so the doctor added a second medicine to help him a bit more.
This is where this victory turns into a flop. The second prescription the doctor added cost $125 a month. I was flabbergasted to say the least. My husband mentioned to her how our intention was to lower our costs not increase them. Yet, our intention to save money had ended up costing us more on a monthly basis.
Now, we are back to the original prescription. Since then, we have learned we can use funds in our Health Saving Account (HSA) to pay for the medicine and any amounts spent are considered part of our family deductible. Since we are funding our deductible monthly in the HSA, our monthly budget has not been impacted.
It just seems that health costs is one area where we have very little control over how much we spend. Our good intentions to save money were thwarted by my husband’s system reaction to the generic medicine. At least our monthly cash flow was not affected by it.