Pick a Card!#?$!

Now it appears that the best card will provide discounts on only three of the nine drugs Mom needs. These account for only $150.44 out of the $453.96 she's currently spending. This is looking less promising all the time.

For the remaining three drugs, I'm supposed to enter her dosages and how many she needs each month. No problem for prednisone or Allegra. But when I get to Isopto Carbachol, I'm stumped. For these eyedrops, Mom gets one bottle at a time, and uses four drops per day. The amount the system automatically suggests is "30 per month (e.g., 30 tablets, 1 bottle, 1 inhaler, etc)." Hmmm. I change the "30" to "1" and hit "Continue."

The system tells me there are 15 programs that provide the three drugs and have participating pharmacies with five miles of her house. I click through to a few, but quickly see that Isopto Carbachol is listed as costing between $4 and $5. Odd. She usually pays $44.99. "1" must have been the wrong dosage to select.

I try again to call for some help on this dosage question. Can't get through. I go back and pick "30." (I assume at first that it must refer to 30 days' supply. I later see that drugstore.com sells these drops in 30 ml bottles, so maybe that's the meaning of the "30" on the Medicare site. Hmmmm. But the next day I find out my mom's bottle is only 15 ml -- so there's a good chance the price quotes I got are for twice as much as she usually uses in a month. Grrr.

It Looks Too Good to Be True

For 30 days (ml?) of Isopto Carbachol 3 percent solution, all the plan prices run about $73 to $75 -- except for The Pharmacy SmartCard, which only charges $17.10. Wow! Now that's a deal. In fact, the Pharmacy SmartCard offers the best prices for the three drugs combined, $95.07, compared with other 14 cards, whose quotes run from $139.25 to $176.62 per month. But a closer look shows that the big price difference on the eyedrops accounts for all the big savings. Pharmacy SmartCard is actually a little pricier on the two other drugs. The annual enrollment fees range from free to $30.

All plans are also list as a participant the Calvert Arundel Pharmacy in Owings, Md., the store my mom has told me she wants to continue using. Perfect.

Pharmacy SmartCard definitely looks like the best deal. But something keeps nagging at me: The price for those eyedrops just sounds too good to be true.

So I find SmartCard's phone number on the Medicare Web site and call. A nice customer service rep answers promptly and looks up the pricing: $26, or $18 for generic.

"But Medicare.gov says your price is $17.10 for brand name."

She doesn't know why that is, but assures me the price is $26. And hey, that's still far better than the other company's prices.

After I get off the phone, it occurs to me: If the price was wrong on the eyedrops, is it wrong on the other stuff?

I call back SmartCard, saying I want prices on all of my mom's drugs and can't find all of them on the Medicare Web site. The customer service rep says I'd better talk to a pharmacist, who may know if the drugs are listed under different names. And guess what -- SmartCard has Medicare discount card prices for all nine drugs. The total comes to $414.47, a savings of around $40 a month, or almost 10 percent better than Mom's doing with Calvert Arundel's senior citizen discount.

But wait a minute. The pharmacist has quoted me $52.53 for the Isopto Carbachol -- the same drug the customer service rep said was $26 (and the Medicare Web site said was $17.10). What gives?

Well, the pharmacist explains, the customer service rep probably looked up the drops under "Isopto" instead of "Iso." But they are called "Isopto," I point out. Yes, that's true, she explains, but their computer system has a glitch in it that the customer service rep probably isn't aware of: You have to enter the drops as "Iso." If you enter them as "Isopto," you get pricing that hasn't been updated since 1997.