That's a really good idea, ST, to have that extra supply. Do you mind sharing (roughly) how much it costs to buy that 25/250 privately? I realize all pharmacies are different, just trying to get a rough idea, thanks!

Sinemet Prices and Sinemet Coupons - GoodRx

it was less than $20.00 for 90 of the 25/250, for some reason it doesn't cost much more than the 25/100. the actual cost is ridiculously cheap until recently and i was told prices have gone up. i'm lucky that one of my former independent pharmacy customers is still in business and will give me better service because i did so many things for him for free, i installed/wrote the software/and supported over 70 pharmacy customers at one time, just by myself, and had many of the major hospitals as customers. i had to tell my customers i had pd but very few changed to a new system and none because i had pd, noone likes to change computer systems and staying with me was the lesser of 2 evils. about 10 years after diagnosis i had to call it quits, i couldn't in good conscience continue to charge my customers, some i had for over 20 years, to maintain their systems when i couldn't guarantee i could continue to support their systems at least a year into the future, and there was a major software change coming due in how pharmacies bill insurance companies which i just couldn't guarantee i could actually finish the software in time and be certified by dozens of insurance companies, each one having a different certification process and each one giving you a short window of time to test in. My customers would have paid me a lot to keep supporting them, to hire help but i felt that might not have worked, allowing someone to work on a pharmacy's computer requires a lot of trust and if i hired the wrong person and the stole information that would be bad and my customers needed to bite the bullet and get new systems from a large vendor which had lots of features i would have to develop from scratch such as optically storing rx's, signatures, linking drug pictures to rx's, automatic refilling over the internet, blah blah blah. anyway, i still have dreams that i missed the deadline and none of my pharmacy customers could bill their insurance companies and i was in big trouble. a pharmacy has 2 weeks to bill a rx, after that they eat the cost so when that problem occurs alarms go off. nothing worse than having to dispense rx's and hope your software vendor will figure out the billing problem within 2 weeks while you are withholding billing $1000's in RX'S everyday. it's great that all pharmacies use the same billing format but it's quite complicated, there are over 1000 different pieces of data that the insurance company can require your software to send and receive, some in any order so each piece of data is preceded by a unique identifier, and with some data elements you can repeat them many times such as disease codes, allergies, basically when your pharmacy sends a claim to your insurance company, it likely goes to a pharmacy benefits manager's computer, which checks if your rx if covered, not filled too soon at any pharmacy, if there is a drug interaction, a medical condition interaction, an allergy interaction, within acceptable dose ranges for your sex/age, makes even more checks and then the response is sent back to the pharmacy, either accepted or rejected and the reasons why and how much the pharmacy will be paid. the screwiest thing about this system is the pharmacy has to send their true cost in the claim and if it's higher than what the claims manager thinks it should be the claims manager will cut the price to what they will allow. the pharmacy can refuse to fill the rx if the reimbursement is too low. but what can happen is the pharmacy might have entered the wrong cost when they setup the drug and be way low, say $10 when it should be $1000 and the benefits manager will reimburse them $10 + dispensing fee,no questions asked, even though the claims manager knows the hi/low costs for this drug. easy to lose money filling rx's if your're a small pharmay. the pharmacist might not see this error until he gets the remittence from the insurance company listing the payment info on their rx's. so to avoid this potential problem, there are companies that will check the numbers on the claim before it goes to the claim processor and won't send it on to the processor if it finds errors. just adds to healthcare costs. and it takes less than 3 seconds to transmit and receive the response back from the claims processor. so to make a long story short, i'm good friends with this pharmacy's owner but i'm sure you can price shop around and find one that won't gauge you. start with GOOD RX.

That is a complicated business! But I understand why, of course, and have a new appreciation for our pharmacy.

I'll call in and see how much private pay would be, assuming we could get a script for "emergency backup" meds.

Thanks, ST, a wealth of information, appreciate it

Lurking,
Just picked up my 25/100 refill and it is Sun Pharma ovals instead of my Actavis round pills...Notice any difference physically with yours vs Mylan? I will let those interested know if I notice a difference over the next couple of weeks....

Eric

No difference, and the ovals are harder to split. The round ones were scored, which made it easier to split. It'd be nice if patients could get the list of ingredients and % for each generic but I guess that would be like giving out the recipe, and no one wants to do that.

My 50/200 CR was filled this month with SUN not my usual. Are people having problems with them? I'm turning into a mess and don't know why. The last week I am having tougher times with my off period. Thought DBS would fix all that but I am still dependent on pills though not as many.

We are at the point to where we can't really tell if we've taken pills or not-we feel crappy most of the time. This has been going on before our Mylan generic got switched over to Sun, though. The neuro agrees we're undermedicated, and that the therapeutic dose probably needs to increase, but doesn't want to increase because that would put us at 1,000mg/day. Or more. Yikes.

Instead, he's giving us a new script for amantadine. I'm hoping it helps, because no one wants to increase sinemet if they don't absolutely have to.

You may need to shop around to find a different generic if the one you are taking isn't working/working as well as it could be.

according to this site,the mylan 50/200 shortage is over but that doesn't guarantee you can get it. it could mean that your pharmacy can get it but has a supply of the sun product they want to get rid of or their wholesaler is giving them a better price on the SUN so they're using the MYLAN shortage to use as an excuse to make a few more pennies. i'm going to reorder my mylan 50/200 tomorrow and will let you know if i can get it. this wouldn't be a problem if the FDA required that generic mfg's of extended release pills actually forced the mfg to prove their extended release capabilities matched the brand name but they don't.
FDA Drug Shortages

i didn't do well on the other indian brand mentioned, have never tried sun products. the ER versions cost around $40 for 90 tablets if you were to buy a refill privately so you have a backup supply
Carbidopa / Levodopa ER Prices and Carbidopa / Levodopa ER Coupons - GoodRx

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