💊 Your $120 copay hides an $8 price

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🤯 WOW! That $120 copay? The cash price on the same prescription might be a lot less. USC researchers found the copay costs more than the drug itself on nearly 1 in 4 prescriptions, and the middleman keeps the difference. Your pharmacist knows. They’re not required to tell you.

📖 Read time: 2 minutes

I was at the pharmacy counter picking up my eyedrops. It’s a morning ritual for me and the corneal transplant in my right eye. The tech says, “$120 with your insurance.” The cash price? $8.

That’s not a fluke. That’s a business model.

Here’s the scheme. Between your insurance card and the pharmacy sits a middleman called a PBM, a pharmacy benefit manager. Sometimes your copay is set higher than the drug’s real price, and the middleman pockets the difference. 

It’s called a clawback, and USC researchers found you overpay on nearly 1 in 4 prescriptions. On generics, it happens even more often. One PBS-covered case: a $285 copay on a drug that cost $40 cash.

For years, PBM contracts gagged pharmacists. They weren’t allowed to volunteer the cheaper price. Congress banned those gag clauses in 2018, but read the fine print of that law: Your pharmacist is allowed to tell you. Nothing requires them to bring it up. 

The silence is legal. Which means the question is on you.

One more thing. Never feel weird asking. The pharmacist isn’t the villain here, they hate the middlemen more than you do. Washington is finally investigating the PBMs, but your refill can’t wait for a Senate hearing.

Ask the question this week. The savings are easy to swallow.

🎯 Send this to someone who takes a daily prescription and has never asked what it actually costs.

📱 Text-worthy: PSA: Your prescription COPAY can cost more than the drug’s cash price. It happens on ~1 in 4 prescriptions (USC study), and the middleman keeps the difference. Pharmacists aren’t required to volunteer that info. Ask “What’s the cash price on this?” every time, and check GoodRx or Cost Plus Drugs first. GetKim.com 

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🛸 Plate expectations: Flock Safety is arming police departments with drones that launch themselves, hit 60 mph, chase fleeing cars and read plates before a patrol car even rolls. Sounds slick until you hear this: In Roseville, Calif., police found 71% of Flock’s stolen-car alerts had a misread plate. Picture that mistake at 400 feet, locked onto your car, your kid’s car or a neighbor who did nothing wrong. I want a human near that launch button. Did the drone tail the right vehicle? Not even remotely.

Sum of all fears: About 40 of the world’s top mathematicians met at OpenAI’s office to answer one uncomfortable question: Is AI coming for their life’s work? One professor presented a talk called The End of Mathematics (paywall link). OpenAI countered with proofs that normally take years of training to crack. If machines can outdo the biggest brains overnight, no white-collar career is bulletproof. Apparently, the reward for mastering impossible equations is training your replacement. How does a mathematician say goodbye? Calc u later.

💼 Your office but smarter: AI isn’t just for chatbots. NetSuite Next puts it to work inside every corner of your business: financials, inventory, HR, customer relationship management. One connected system, real-time insights, and the routine busywork handles itself. For the first time ever, you can try it free. If your revenue’s in the seven figures, head to NetSuite.AI/KIM.*

School of hard cash: Your teenager can probably quote parlay odds but not credit card interest. That should bother every parent. Good news: About 30 states require a personal finance class to graduate, up from just eight in 2020. Researchers link that single semester to roughly $100,000 in lifetime benefit. One forgotten elective traded for real lessons on debt, paychecks, saving and the math on why betting apps always win? I’ll take that deal all day. It makes cents.

💾 Show me the memo: That dusty laptop from three jobs ago? It might be hiding real money between Final_Final_v7 and a 2018 client memo. Handshake AI is paying professionals up to $30,000 (paywall link) for authentic work docs, think decks, legal briefs and engineering specs to train AI models. But careful: NDAs, client secrets and company contracts still count, even years later. Sell only what you actually own, or that easy side hustle becomes a deposition. FYI, I never keep secrets in Excel. People spreadsheet about you.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Filming one-handed? On iPhone, hold the shutter button to record, then slide your finger up to zoom in or down to zoom out. Android makes it easy, too. Start recording, then tap the 0.5x, 2x, 4x or 10x buttons above. See? You can frame the perfect shot even when your other hand is busy.

🧒 Is your teen using ChatGPT? Study mode pushes them to work through school assignments instead of spitting out answers immediately. It puts tighter limits on romance, self-harm and graphic chats, too. It should switch on automatically. If not, go to Settings > Parental controls > Add family member. And yes, it works on free accounts.

🕵️ Before you trust that Instagram account: If you’re buying something or just getting a weird vibe, first do a quick background check. Open the seller’s profile, tap the three dots in the top right, then About this account. You’ll see when they joined, where they’re based and any former usernames. Brand-new account with a bunch of name changes? I’d be very careful.

🚗 Why is that app on your car screen? Stop swiping past stuff you never use just to find Spotify. On iPhone, go to Settings > General > CarPlay > your car > Customize, then tap the minus to hide apps. On Android, open Android Auto > Display > Customize Launcher. Remove the junk and move your favorites up front.

🔕 The group chat can survive without you: You don’t need 10 pings about Sunday’s dessert options. 💀 On iPhone, open Messages, swipe left on the conversation and tap the bell with the slash through it. On Android, open Google Messages > three dots > Details > Notifications > Silent. Messages still come through. Read them when you feel like it.

📺 Alexa+ is coming to your Fire TV for free: Yep, no Prime subscription needed. The big upgrade is conversational search. Instead of searching for an exact movie title, ask something like, “Find me a highly rated thriller,” and Alexa+ will pull up suggestions. It’ll roll out automatically on current-gen Fire TV Sticks and smart TVs with Alexa+ built in. Ask your TV for a thriller, and it delivers. Ask your family, and you get 40 minutes of scrolling.

Apple’s next AirPods may finally answer the question nobody asked: What if your headphones could stare at people?

A leaked demo appears to show tiny cameras built into the stems, feeding low-resolution images to Siri’s Visual Intelligence. Hold up a book, point at something interesting or ask for directions, and your earbuds become a pair of tiny AI interns taking visual notes.

The clip hit 4.6 million views, but Apple hasn’t officially announced them or addressed the privacy backlash. 

Check them out here yourself. I’ll keep an ear out for updates. 

🎓 What you learned today: Your prescription copay may be higher than the cash price, Flock drones can chase cars and read plates from above, old work files are suddenly worth money as AI training data if you actually own the rights, personal finance classes are finally spreading through schools, and Apple’s rumored camera-equipped AirPods are raising privacy eyebrows before they even exist. Not bad for one email. If your power bill keeps climbing and your habits haven’t changed, there may be a very expensive reason: data centers. Tomorrow, I’ll explain who’s using the power, who’s paying for it and why it matters.

⚡ The answer: C) 21. Yep, 21 devices and 21 doors into your home network. You probably haven’t updated the lock on half of them since the box was opened. Want to see the real list? Open your router’s app (or type its address into a browser) and look at “connected devices.” Anything you can’t identify? Investigate, then evict.

Cameras, plugs, TVs and doodads go on guest Wi-Fi. Laptops, phones and banking stay on the main one. A hacked smart plug shouldn’t be a roommate with your tax returns. The forgotten ones are the risk: that old tablet in a drawer, still on Wi-Fi, hasn’t seen a security update since two presidents ago. Forget it from the network.

Twenty-one devices, one password, zero supervision. It’s not a smart home, it’s a group project. And you know how those go.

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Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, Snailax, KAUGIC, @aronp613 via X

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