Slash Drug Costs Org - A Great Example Of Grassroots Success

[1DayAAT]

Slash Drug Costs was not even an idea until the fall of 2006. A few people got together and realized that if they could help each other reduce medication costs then sharing their knowledge could help others. It was easy to see that if more people added their knowledge then the extra ideas would reduce costs further and be able to help even more people.

Choices were made that most business people would say doomed the group before any work was done. The standard model for creating and running a citizen group organization was scrapped. Slash Drug Costs needed to be squeaky clean if it was to be effective. If any money was accepted from any company, organization, foundation, etc. then it might appear that suggestions on how to save money might be biased.

It was a good time to try something new. The best way to share knowledge in our age is by using the internet. A web site can be created and run with very limited funds. It also allows the organization to be run without an office. Everyone working for Slash Drug Costs is an unpaid volunteer. Also, since no monies are ever accepted and no one is paid, there is no paperwork that often bogs down many groups.

An unconventional decision madeSlash Drug Costs completely unique. Unlike any other web site that helps people get the medications they need, this group will help ANYONE. It does not matter if they are poor or not, they will get help. Some of the people who come here must make daily choices between using their money for the most basic living expenses or paying for the prescriptions necessary to keep them alive. Some people with fairly high incomes have great needs also. There are lifesaving drugs which cost over $100,000.00 a year. A great many senior citizens have very low incomes but have assets that limit their eligibility on other sites. People should not have to be poverty stricken in order to afford their medications.

All of this knowledge about saving money is valuable to a great many people. Organizations typically would call this an asset and treat it like money in the bank. Instead the group knew that ALL information about saving money needed to be free for people to use in any way they want (They do not even need to say where the information came from). If there was ANY type of ownership of the knowledge here then people might limit the ideas they share. This actually was an easy decision because the organizers share a strong belief that information should be free.

The web site was officially launched by word of mouth in November of 2006. It was a trial balloon that allowed people to use it to both save money and also to provide their own ideas. Inputs from these pioneering users have provided the information necessary to continually modify this site to be as useful as possible.

Since the initial launch, there has been an extreme number of changes to make it as easy as possible for internet novices to use. Double-click definitions were added to make all ideas easily understandable for people, even if they have little knowledge about health matters or medications.

The structure of the knowledge itself has been changed. Various subjects have been removed, other subjects were merged together, and others subjects were added. The biggest change was to provide direct answers to people

[jimithy]

updated and checked for broken links. 9/16/2011 by jimithy