A guy went viral this week telling people to use GoodRx to escape their insurance pricing. He is right that your insurance price is probably too high. He is wrong about what GoodRx is. GoodRx does not negotiate anything. It surfaces prices that pharmacy benefit managers already set. The same PBMs that built the price you are trying to escape. Express Scripts, OptumRx, CVS Caremark, MedImpact, Navitus. GoodRx has contracts with all of them. Follow the money on a GoodRx fill. You hand over the coupon. The pharmacy processes that claim through a specific PBM. The pharmacy then pays a per-prescription fee to that PBM. The PBM shares a slice of that fee back to GoodRx for sending you there. GoodRx has reported earning roughly 15% of your total prescription cost. So the PBM gets paid when you use your insurance, and the PBM gets paid when you use GoodRx to get around your insurance. Both roads lead to the same building. The scale of this is not small. In 2020 alone GoodRx accounted for about $3.4 billion in prescription revenue and collected nearly $500 million in fees from PBMs. Three out of four people using GoodRx already had insurance. They were paying premiums every month and still needed a coupon to afford their own medication. Sit with the shape of that. You pay a PBM premiums all year. That PBM sets a price so high you cannot use it. Then a company funded by that same PBM shows you a different price the PBM also set, and the PBM collects a fee on that transaction too. Express Scripts made GoodRx its exclusive discount card provider for commercial members. CVS Caremark runs its own version. These are not competitors sneaking around the PBMs. These are the PBMs opening a second register. Industry analysts have been blunt about why the two prices exist at all. Different PBMs have different contracted rates, legacy contracts do not reflect current market pricing, and the same PBM offers different rates to different clients. If the cash rate were easy to see, employers would demand it. The confusion is the product. GoodRx is better than overpaying, and if it is what you have, use it. I would rather someone save $40 than not. But understand you are not escaping the system. You are using the system's back door and paying a toll to the same people who locked the front one. There is a version of this where none of it applies. No PBM, no coupon, no fee routed to anyone. We buy the drug and sell it to you at our cost plus a flat fee. The price is the price, and nobody in the middle gets a cut. Head to forestparkpharmacy.com, look at the price checker, and see what your medication actually costs. See ya.