Amazon announced the launch of a drug subscription program called RxPass, a Prime membership add-on which costs $5 per month. RxPass is part of Amazon pharmacy and offers free unlimited medications from a select list. Medications that treat more than 80 common conditions, such as high blood pressure, anxiety, sleep disorders, acid reflux and even erectile dysfunction, are included in the RxPass subscription. Almost half of all U.S. residents take one of the medications available in this program.
You’ll get unlimited medications delivered free to your door; you just have to pay the $5 monthly fee and then unlimited medications are available to you at no cost. You first need to be a Prime member which comes with a cost of $139/year or $14.99/month. Go here for a 30-Day Free Trial for a Family Membership or a Free 6-Month Student membership.
Lots of popular medications are on this list, there are even some supplements there like Vitamin B12 and Biotin. Apparently those can get prescribed by a doctor.
RxPass can be a real moneysaver for many people, especially for someone who already pays for Prime as this will only cost them $5 extra per month. This can be a deal for someone who takes even one medication from the list, and can be major savings for someone who takes multiple of these medications.
I switched to using Amazon Pharmacy a while back and have been happy with them. I’ll save some money with an RxPass subscription plan for my one monthly subscription which I found on the list. I’ve found it worthwhile to pay their prices without using insurance since, ironically, it’s about half the cost without insurance versus with insurance. The Amazon system lets me choose whether to go through insurance or buy it directly without involving insurance.
Note: RxPass does restrict eligibility based on insurance and the state where medications will be shipped. People with government-funded insurance such as Medicare or Medicaid are not eligible sign up for RxPass right now. Additionally, RxPass is not currently available to send medications to California, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Amazon Pharmacy is still available in all of those states.
RxPass is a money-loser for Amazon, but will bring over new customers to Amazon Pharmacy.
You can find the full list of around 60 medications on the homepage. Go here to see the best credit cards to use at Drugstoes and Pharmacies or to use at Amazon here.
Make sure to compare to other programs such as Cost Plus Drugs that Mark Cuban launched as one reader observed. We tried Amazon pharmacy and have no complaints. The prices are usually better than places like CVS and somewhat comparable to Costco. That said, I did switch my medications to Mark Cuban’s innovation, even with the $5 shipping it ended up being cheaper than Amazon with my two generics clocking in at ~$6 and ~$8 for 90 day supplies: This can be found at Cost Plus Drugs.
A con to this program is that It looks like each adult would have to have their own Prime Membership in order to take advantage of this. Prescriptions for multiple people can’t be combined on one Pharmacy profile except for children under 18.
