No matter who you are, you probably know that the cost of health related supplies or pharmaceuticals can be pretty costly. Even though you can write off some of these costs, you can’t be happy paying high prices for it up front; no one is.

What we find is that people tend to go to the store or pharmacy that’s closest to home. It turns out those stores don’t often offer the best deals. In some cases, there are stores and pharmacies that will offer special deals for people with specific diseases like diabetes and cholesterol issues. This is helpful to know when your insurance company either doesn’t cover the bulk of the cost of your medication or other supplies.

For instance, one local store considers itself the friend of diabetics. If you’re on insulin and have a valid prescription, they’ll give you syringes for no cost. As a comparison, most of the other stores in the area charge between $30 and $45 for the same 100 syringe supply; you can’t save any more money than that.

Another local store offers some cholesterol reducing medication at a drastically reduced rate than most other stores. For instance, at most stores a prescription of Pravastatin at 20MG costs around $40 for a 30-day supply. This one particular store offers it at $37 for a 3-month supply.

Most people are willing to do a lot of shopping for the lower price of things like groceries and appliances, but when it comes to health care related items, even health care services, for some reason people are reluctant to try to find the best prices available. While it’s true that the cost of health care can be high sometimes, there are still deals of all sorts to be found by taking a little bit of time, picking up the phone and calling around.

For that matter, sometimes you can look online and find lower prices for some medical supplies you might need. It turns out eBay is a pretty good place to find a lot of medical supplies at a reduced rate. Sometimes the seller requires you have a prescription for those items, but most of the time it’s just a straight up transaction. For some items you might have to check out expiration dates, but in doing some research we’ve found that most supplies are actually good past those dates for up to a year.

You can save a lot of money if you’ll take the time to shop around for the best deal possible. As always, don’t drive 30 miles to save a dollar, but if you can save a lot for the same thing then it’s worth exploring.