PRLog ? Mercury Healthcare International, Inc. is a globally integrated health delivery system®. The company provides the largest integrated health delivery system access in the world, offering health savings at over 800,000 domestic and international healthcare providers to employers, expatriates, insurers and individuals. MHI Certified Care Navigators? assist clients to arrange care for routine, emergency and elective healthcare needs both in the US and more than 40 other countries. In addition to the 54,000 participating pharmacies throughout the US and mail order prescription savings, the network includes over 6,000 hospitals that have been pre-screened and subjected to detailed inspections, and over 750,000 doctors and over 65,000 ancillary professionals whose credentials have been verified and reviewed to US-managed care standards. This means that our members can save money on treatment in the US and abroad, and get their prescription medications at incredible savings before they leave and after they return home. Through a corps of health benefits agents, brokers and consultants, MHI offers more than 35,000 employers in the US with self-funded health benefit plans the opportunity for their plan members to access MHI’s negotiated network rates on routine, urgent, emergent and elective procedures, and offers full health travel logistics coordination and case management in the US and abroad. The company also offers a voluntary enrollment program for individual and family access to the network under a membership program with over 2.3 million card-carrying individual consumer clients who enjoy MHI membership savings in addition to any insurance coverage they may currently have or who might be enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid programs, and to others without any insurance coverage. Now, in addition to being able to elect domestic or international health travel as an option for scheduled, elective, high-cost medically necessary diagnostic and surgical procedures, MHI clients and members can access prescription discounts at most local chain and independent pharmacies throughout the US. For members of self-funded health benefit plans and labor unions, typically, pharmacy co-pays are more than $25 and some medications may not be covered at all. Our new program will most likely save money on any prescription where the co-pay is more than $10. Some of our members have saved up to 90% at Walgreens, CVS, Costco and Sam’s Club. In addition to the mail order savings available, MHI also offers a website where members of the public can access savings just like they access medical tourism packages. On this special webpage, they can look up their medications by dose and quantity, find participating pharmacies within a 25-mile radius and then know the price and the discount before they go to the pharmacy. The discounts work in addition to any prescription coverage they may currently have and can also save money on the Medicare Donut Hole. “In some cases, for medications like antibiotics, blood thinners, diabetes medicines and antidepressants, the savings are excellent and often save money on generic prescriptions except for the inexpensive $4 prescriptions already pre-discounted by the pharmacies,” says Maria K Todd, MHA Ph.D., Founder and CEO of The Mercury Healthcare Companies. MHI members get the prescription savings at more than 54,000 pharmacies as a free added bonus of membership. ?Offering a prescription savings benefit to our clients and 2.3 million card-carrying members seems like a no-brainer when you consider how many people live and work without prescription coverage, and how often medications go unfilled in favor of paying rent or heating bills or buying groceries,? said Todd. ?We?re doing our part to improve health quality and medication compliance with access to affordable care. Employers who offer our programs save so much money on prescription costs alone that they tend to almost completely offset our network access fees for routine, urgent, emergent care and elective surgery. “Each month we’ve received testimonials about how people saved money with our free card that enabled them to cover some other important bill without being forced to choose filling a prescription their doctor prescribed,” Todd continues. “One member reported a $2,100 monthly pharmacy bill was reduced to $910 from a pharmacy within walking distance of his apartment. Before using our card, he was driving to five different pharmacies all over town to find minimal savings on his monthly life-saving medications. With his monthly savings, he’s buying a home for the first time in his life!” In one hour last week, for one community in the state of Indiana, 29 prescriptions were purchased at local chain and independent pharmacies, and the average savings were 38.58%. This is replicated nationwide on a free card. For self-funded benefit plans and unions, the prescription savings to the plans are remarkable. With our free pharmacy discount card, plan participants and their families are instructed to use the discount card first to determine what their out-of-pocket spend will be on their prescriptions. It’s great that people will now be able to access discount for this, as well as many other discounts using digital coupons from online sites! With regards to the current topic, in many cases, if the copayment is $10-25 with their insurance plan, the entire cost of the prescription would have been lower without involving their pharmacy benefit, and therefore no claims expense is incurred to their plan, thus no claim cost recorded on claims experience.