It's impossible, because there's hundreds or thousands of different combinations of medicare plans in any location. In addition, any given medicare plan has "staged" coverage for drugs depending on how much money they're spending on *other* drugs.
1. Deductible - Patient pays 100% of drug cost. This is usually very small, a few hundred dollars a year
2. Initial coverage - depending on the plan, patient pays up to 25% of the negotiated cost of the medicine. This is often a fairly affordable fee for something like insulin - my patients often pay $40-50 during their months of initial coverage
3. Coverage gap - this is what is known as the "donut hole" - patient is responsible for 25% of the list price of the medicine (for brand names) or 36% (for generics) - for insulin, this is often up to $200/month
4. Catastrophic coverage - after you spent $5k or so out of pocket, you hit catastrophic coverage- and pay at most 5% of the drug cost.
This is for a "normal" part D plan - but there's tons of variations, particularly if the patient has a medicare advantage plan. Medicare is quite literally the absolute hardest one to figure out what *anything* will cost the patient, because of the above and the fact it's almost impossible to find an accurate formulary/cost search for any given plan. I've given up at this point - even when I find a website for *that* insurer and I specify *that* exact plan, the cost it quotes is inevitably wrong. And it's illegal for medicare patients to use coupons.
I prescribe something random, write the pharmacy may subtitute alternatives if they're better covered (prescribe Lantus, say may substitute basaglar, toujeo, tresiba, levemir for example), and if the patient can't afford anything (which happens too often), there's always the option of human insulin for $25/vial from Walmart or CVS. No other insurance - no commercial plan, tricare, medicaid - is as frustrating to deal with.
