I got a call from some company I never heard of called Savon SP who claimed they got my info from my husband's employer and they claimed to be offering copay assistance. Since I already have the Enbrel copay assistance, I told them I wasn't interested, but then did a little more googling about them because I never heard of them before. I found this:

"I first profiled the SaveonSP program offered via Express Scripts in Latest Express Scripts Data: Slow Drug Spending Growth—And Big Plan Savings from Manufacturer Copay Programs. SaveonSP has elements of a copay maximizer program. For example, a patient’s actual out-of-pocket drug costs are $0, so they never reach any annual deductible nor any out-of-pocket maximum based on these drugs. (The patients can still face a deductible, if their plan has one.) However, SaveonSP differs in some important ways from a standard maximizer program.

With SaveonSP, a commercial plan sponsor declares specialty drugs to be “non-essential health benefits.” Non-essential drugs are still covered by the plan, but they are not subject to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Essential Health Benefit requirements and can be removed from the out-of-pocket maximums required by the ACA.

The patient’s out-of-pocket costs are set equal to the maximum annual value of a manufacturer's copayment program. Thus, the copayment is not based on the list or net price of the drug. It is instead determined solely based upon the amount of manufacturer-funded copay assistance. For instance, a program with a total value of $20,000 in copayment support would require a patient to pay $20,000 annually for their drugs, without regard to the plan’s out-of-pocket maximums.

To avoid these extraordinary costs, the beneficiaries must enroll separately in SaveonSP. They must also fill their prescriptions exclusively from Express Scripts’ Accredo specialty pharmacy.

SaveonSP profits mightily from this scheme. According to minutes of the New Mexico Retiree Health Care Authority meeting (page 11), SaveonSP charges a 25% fee of the copayment support. So, SaveonSP would earn $5,000 of a manufacturer’s copayment support program that had a total value of $20,000?!? That’s totally outrageous—and clearly not what the manufacturer’s copay support program was designed to do.

Here are a few more fun facts about the company:

• “SAVE ON SP, LLC” was founded in 2015, according to New York state’s Corporation & Business Entity Database.

• SaveonSP is not owned by Express Scripts. Who owns this company? I have no idea. As I noted in my February article, SaveonSP has an amazingly uninformative webpage. Check out saveonsp.com to see what I mean.

• From what I can determine, Express Scripts is SaveonSP’s only client for its copay assistance solution. However, an Express Scripts spokesperson told me that SaveonSP also “does work for our mutual clients that is consultative in nature and outside of the scope of the PBM/payer relationship.”

• That doesn’t clarify why SaveonSP operates as a stand-alone business or how it avoids apparent conflicts when it consults with clients of its primary customers. Very strange."

This is from this site and they mention a few other similar schemes: https://www.drugchannels.net/2020/05/why-do-cvs-and-express-scripts-rely-on.html

It's like every few years these asshats think up a new way to scam our health insurance system. It makes me furious!