How to make and find a Medicare D Planfinder List of Medicines

1. Go to the Medicare Website www.medicare.gov
2. On the front page at the top of the main “Medicare Spotlight” click on the top choice “Compare Medicare Prescription Drug Plans”
3. On the next page on the left click on “Find and Compare Plans”
4. On the next page on the right click on “Begin general search”
5. The next page announces step 2. You put in your zip code and answer all 3 questions “no”. (this assumes you are looking for the unsubsidized prices). Then click “continue.”
6. The next page announces step 3, Review Current Coverage and Consider options. Just hit “continue.” Trust me, this page has nothing worth looking at.
7. OK, now we are getting there. This next page invites you to “enter my drugs”. If this is your first time, hit this button at the top; if you have already entered a list, put in its file number, which you should have saved, and its identifying date, and hit “retrieve my drugs”.
8. Assuming you hit “enter my drugs” you now are on a page titled Find and Compare Plans, and below that Find and Enter Your Drug Information. Below that is a box titled “enter drug name”. You can do this by typing it in or choosing from a drop-down list. I prefer the former as I am used to typing out drug names, and if you can do this it is faster than waiting for the alphabetized lists of meds to load, but if you are not a good typist or would simply like to shop the lists, you can select from the drop-downs. In general you should use the generic name for drugs sold generically and the brand name for drugs that are brand only. If you enter the brand name for a medication that is available as a generic, your list will usually find the generic for you. Sometimes it will list both the generic and brand version of a drug if you enter both the brand and generic names, but not always; this may have to do with the fact that not all brands and their generics cover the same dosage strengths, but I don’t really know why this is. The planfinder tends to go with the generic listing, especially with older medications. So don’t be surprised if an old brand name that you enter does not make it to the final, plan specific lists that you will soon see. There are some points of confusion when a drug is beginning to enter the now rather drawn out process of becoming generic, so always try both names (or more, in the case of meds that change their brand name like Razadyne or where there are 2 brands of the same molecule). The planfinder is still a bit slow on the draw in picking up new brands that the plans are covering, so if you are looking for a very new drug you may have to get the information about price and UM directly from the plan, or from the drug’s detail people.
9. When you have entered all the drugs you want to follow, up to 25 of them, hit “save my drug list”. The next page will ask you to enter a date, you can pick any date from 1900 on that will be a password when you return to see your list. Do this, then hit “continue”.
10. Now comes a page you will want to print, or at least carefully copy the drug list ID number and date you have chosed from, as you will need it to get back to your list. You can save this in you’re My Medicare account if you have one, I think you have to be a Medicare beneficiary to have such an account. When you have made one or more copies of this important numbers and date, hit continue.
11. The next page offers you the choice of selecting a particular pharmacy or not. The green-titled box at the left of the page advises to not choose a particular pharmacy, so as to see the lowest plan prices, since these vary from pharmacy to pharmacy. (This is not the whole story, as it does not seem to be taking into account the big-box prices that are offered within Medicare D that you get TrOOP credit for.) So click the no button here and hit continue.
12. Now you have arrived in the land of data. The left top of the page announces Your Personalized Plan List. Scroll down to see all of the PDP’s in your region, or there are links at the top of the page to the Medicare HMO’s, this year called Medicare Health Plans, and Special Needs Plans. Selecting favorites puts them at the top of the page and you call up three plan comparisons if you want; they are arrayed 5 at a time by default, I usually like to call up the whole list so I can scroll around looking for what I want. The order of appearance is by the total cost of all the drugs you have chosen, so this will vary with each list you enter.

It seems that the vast majority of Medicare D recipients are in a few large national plans, so if you start looking at plans, chose the ones that your patients tend to be in, not the obscure marginal ones that have flocked to the market because of the initial subsidies. Before you start surfing around on your list, print the whole list off, this will give you another chance to save your ID number and date, at the top left, and will tell you how many of the PDP’s operating in your region are currently being listed by the Medicare site. For somewhat obscure reasons, Medicare may remove major players from the site for periods of time, this happened a good deal in 2006 and it is happening this year. So if a big plan like, say Humana is not showing up on your list, do not think that it has gone out of business; if you want info about it you will have to go directly to the plan until it appears again. You can check what the full number of plans are in your region in other areas of the Medicare D site, and if the number of plans your list is pulling up is less than that, it means that some of the plans are doing some time in the woodshed.

View your list in the domain of a particular plan by clicking the plan name on the left. This will take you to a long “page” with the plan contact information at the top, a link to the plan website in case you want to check their formulary directly, and a comparison of the cost of the medications on your list in-store and through mail order, if the plan does mail order (most do). Then it lists the UM edits for the drugs on your list, followed by the prices, listing “full price” initial period copay, donut hole price and catastrophic coverage prices. The mail prices are easy to miss because for some reason you have to hit the + sign next to the mail price title that follows the in-store price list to get these prices to drop down. This is a very odd design flaw in this otherwise pretty amazing database, but so be it. Hit the plus to see the mail prices. And if you want to print them out along with the rest of the information for the plan, here is a tip: at the top left of each plan list is a button, Print this Page. Hit the button and the page will transform into something like a PDF. The print box will drop automatically. CANCEL it. Then on this new form of the list, scr. mail prices appear. THEN hit control P or otherwise call up the print box. I have found that if you print from the automatic print box, the mail prices usually will not print, even if you have quickly hit the plus sign and caused them to drop down on the displayed print friendly page You can save time and paper if instead of printing out the whole list, now 8-12 pages long, you only select about the first 2/3 of the pages (this will vary according to the length of your list, including dosage sizes and whether the plan has a mail system). So frinstance I usually select pages 1-8 out of 12 to be printed. The last few pages show the dosage sizes, and graphs of the costs that may be of interest to individual patients, but are not that useful if a provider is using this process mostly to monitor the prices. Saving a few pages with each printout makes a difference, if like me, you decide to print the prices for every plan in your region, usually over 50. I do this because I am doing research on this stuff, and I never know when a plan will be banished from the Medicare website so I cannot easily get at its data.

Before you leave the long page for the plan you have been looking at, save it on your favorite places, make a folder for these URL’s so you can find them easily, remembering to title each one as you save it; the default names for these pages are all the same, so you have to type in the name of the plan. This is worth it, at least for the common plans, because then you can find each plan page displaying one of your lists with a double click from your favorites list while you are connected to the internet, without having to go through the Medicare D site or all of the above pages again. (To get to the list of all the plans in your region you do have to go through the process, entering your ID number and date-password at step 7; this does not take long at all).

Once you have entered your list of 25 or fewer medications you can easily modify it from any of the plan pages, adding meds if you have not used your full 25 slots, adding an unlimited number of dosage sizes, or removing meds and replacing them with others. I use 4 or 5 lists at the moment, for common generic, common brand, and other special groupings of psych meds. Curiously, the planfinder lists medications that are not Medicare D drugs, like benzos, with prices, so I have a benzo list too, but by and large 2 or 3 lists should suffice for most prescribers. Lists of plans can be shared once entered by sharing the ID number and date, and single plan specific medication lists can be shared by passing their URL’s around, but keep in mind that they can be changed by anyone signed on to them, so if you share your list, decide on a convention regarding changes. Once you get the hang of this, punching in 25 drugs does not take very long.

Return to Part D Menu