Why the cheapest option is often not the cheapest — that is the question, and I have not found it answered plainly anywhere I have looked.
Reading back through what has been written here about cheapest option, three questions come up every time and only one has ever been answered properly.
Listing all three, with what I think the state of the answer is for each, so the thread can start further along than the last one did.
Coming back to the opening post, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.
Taking cheapest option seriously for a moment rather than deflecting: the honest position is that the community has observations and no controlled comparison, and those two things support very different sentences.
The most useful pricing posts here are the ones that show the arithmetic rather than the conclusion.
Confirming post #4 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.
My experience of cheapest option contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.
Fine by me. I had wanted a stronger conclusion and there is not one available.
Nobody has said the unglamorous part of cheapest option yet, so: most of the variation is explained by things that are boring to write about and easy to check.
Reading this cheapest option thread as someone who came in with a fixed view: the third and seventh replies moved me and the confident ones did not.
Post #9 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.
Nothing here is financial advice and none of it is a route to a transaction.
Building on post #13 rather than restating it.
Whatever the answer on cheapest option turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, invite the correction.
Where somebody posts a comparison, the useful version states the date, the region and what was included.
Post #13 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.
The number people quote for cheapest option is a central estimate presented without its interval, and the interval is wide enough that the estimate is nearly uninformative on its own.
Discount programmes and coupons: manufacturers often offer coupons that reduce out-of-pocket costs if insurance is not covering or is covering at a high copay. These have eligibility restrictions but can save money.
Old habit: I write down the expected answer before I calculate it.
Adding the measurement that post #17 says would settle it.
What I want from this cheapest option thread is the list of things that would need to be true for the claim to hold. If we can write that list, we can check it.
Insurance tier placement: a compound might be covered but on a higher tier (higher copay). Moving to a lower tier usually requires prior authorization or documented failure of cheaper alternatives.
The general case is well covered; this is the awkward specific one.
Marking my uncertainty on cheapest option explicitly. I am confident about the direction, much less confident about the size, and not confident at all that it generalises past the case in the first post.
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Manufacturer assistance programmes and their eligibility rules
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