Opinion: Staying solvent while doing drugs.

But you're still bleeding money, because you pay way too much for drugs that you take every day. They make up the bulk of your medical expenses.

Let's say you're an average 75-year-old, not in great shape but still getting around town and making trouble. You are on Celebrex, Hyzaar HCTZ, Prevacid, Xalatan and Zocor (*Simvastatin). You also take Flomax if you're a guy, or Fosamax (*Alendronate) if you're a woman, so our numbers will include both the boys and the girls. You do use *generics when allowed -- if you don't, you shouldn't even be reading this.

You can expect to spend a lot: $5,000 to $8,000 a year for these six drugs, buying 90-day batches at the drug store.

With their $10- or $20-a-year discount cards, CVS charges $7,941 (men) or $6,412 (women); Walgreen's gets $6,307 and $4,963. You might think that mail-ordering would save you money; not so. CVS by mail jumps to $8,124 and $7,052. Walgreen soars to $8,300 and $7,071.

D Is for Dumb

You can go into a so-called "Medicare Part D" plan (it's really private drug insurance), but you save nothing. The government is pressuring you to buy Part D, by allowing insurance companies to jack up their prices 1 percent for every month that you hesitate. (Do you wonder how much cash it takes to buy a few hundred legislators in Washington? Less than 100 million customers generate in profits, I assure you.)

In Part D, you pay certain fixed costs. The numbers fall out of medicare.gov when you shake it. There will be the monthly premium, reaching possibly $300 a year. Then for your first several months, you get drugs at about one-third of retail (sound good? it's not), until you've spent $2,830 at the drug counter, including a deductible of perhaps $300. Then you fall into the "gap," where you pay retail price for all six drugs, no discounts, until the gap has cost you another $1,720, no exceptions. Now you're out almost $5,000 for your six drugs, and some plans go over $7,000. You spend the last month or two of the plan year buying drugs for almost nothing (sound good? It's not). Mail ordering, again, saves you nothing. Bottom line, Part D is almost as bad as retail.

It might seem strange to you that 48 plans giving you the same six drugs, in the same six dosages, identically-priced at drug, grocery and discount stores, cost you anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000. The reason is that they all cost the same after all. The cheaper plans forbid lots of drugs, insist on cheap ones to delay your end-of-year bargains, hassle you more, and hit you with more hidden gotchas. You have a new prescription? A new doctor? You're in trouble, no matter what plan you buy. Bottom line, Part D is worse than retail.

C Is for Complexity

Another drug game in the government casino is the higher-priced Part C, the same worthless drug insurance plus all kinds of little twists on the hospitals and doctors of Parts A and B. Each Part C policy has hundreds of price switches and we-won't-pays, until it resembles one of those awful refrigerators with this week's food packing the front layer, but you'd better forget about the hundreds of moldy items that are jammed in the back. The impossibly complex Part C details are on the Medicare Web site, and also on company 800 phone numbers. By my calculation, it will take you 197 years of eight-hour days, if you are efficient, to learn how all their buried gotchas will affect your actual yearly costs. So good luck choosing, but choosing "forget it" is a wise choice.

A major part of the trouble you face in Parts C and D is telephone customer so-called service. You start by pressing a whole lot of buttons, obeying robo-voice orders. Twenty minutes after you dial the third 800 number (the first two chased you away), a real person comes on. That person is in a 4-by-4 cubicle in a room larger than a football field, with 1,000 cubicles on this floor alone. The phone cable coming into this building is bigger around than your uncle Henry. The rep's pay is even worse than the factory-farm environment, plus he/she is only two weeks on the job (nobody stays long at that pay), so the answers will often be wrong.

Being careful, you ask 10 questions to see if you want this plan. You get three straight answers (one of them incorrect), three don't-knows, and four one-liners from a list of 100 taped on the cubicle wall that have absolutely no meaning in English.

Count yourself lucky. After you join and hit "2" for members, you will get no straight answers, four don't-knows, four one-liners, and two thinly veiled requests to stop being stupid and get off the phone.

Cold Cuts

The sad part is that your six drugs on the open market do not cost $8,000, do not cost $7,000, and do not cost $5,000. They cost $1,390 (men) or $1,338 (women) per year. That's right, Bunkie, cut-rate Canada! You can stop reading now, but that will cost you $5,000 a year. Assuming you last another 20 years, are you comfortable throwing $100,000 into the street?

If you're still with us, there's nothing wrong with Canadian drugs but your fear, like when you learned to ride a bike. The $1,364 (average) yearly price includes generics again, which nicely do the job of those six common drugs. (Specialists do avoid some generics for deadly conditions, like seizures, mood disorders and heart arrhythmia.)

Possibly you're not on six drugs, but only two or maybe a dozen. The calculations come out the same: The very best Part C and D plans still look sick next to Canadian prices.

Long ago, the feds decided that keeping your drug dollars out of Canada was neither fair nor possible. Congress passed a law, section 804(3) part 21, U.S.Code §384, Importation of Prescription Drugs, which says: "In particular, the Secretary shall by regulation grant individuals a waiver to permit individuals to import into the United States a prescription drug that ... will result in a significant reduction in the cost of covered products to the American consumer." The Secretary (of H.E.W.) has not written that regulation, but our government (all sources agree) carefully avoids picking on people who buy from Canadian drug stores by mail. You need prescriptions, of course.

Canadians don't manufacture drugs; they import them from India, Israel, many countries in northern Europe -- What's that? You say you don't want imported drugs? Where do you think "American" drugs are made?

You should crawl the Web and pick your own discounter; even Canadian prices vary widely. My own choice was northwestpharmacy.com, which has the prices I quoted and hasn't screwed up an order yet. They save money by drop-shipping; the factory in Sweden or India ships to you, and the mailman rings your bell for a signature. It takes almost a month in all, so plan to plan ahead. Their Internet ordering works better than the phone; for instance, if you select a drug red-labeled "free shipping," you get all the items on your list with no shipping charges, even from 10 different countries. They also allow change-of-mind returns -- you'll never see that in Westport.

Without those Part C and Part D mudholes, and without American drug company roadblocks, it's your bike and your country road. If you like the idea of saving $5,000 a year by being brave and careful, go for it.

David Royce is a long-time activist who originated and won approval for Westport's Town Hall.