As someone with a deeper understanding of health insurance, have you come up with a tech setup to make your health care less frustrating?

My family and I are healthy, and thankfully our health insurance is pretty simple.

But here’s one thing I do: Whenever we are prescribed a drug, especially a generic, I check the cost of the drug on a site called GoodRx before I fill the prescription using my insurance. That’s because, as I’ve written with Charles Ornstein of ProPublica, it’s sometimes cheaper to pay cash for drugs than to use insurance. GoodRx shows the cash price of drugs at nearby pharmacies.

Sometimes that’s easier said than done: When my daughter was 2, she needed drops for an ear infection. She was so cranky while we waited in line that I didn’t check to see if using my insurance was the best deal. I later learned I would have saved money if I had paid cash.

Amazon is getting into the drug business with its acquisition of Pillpack. Is this a game changer?

Amazon has upended everything from books to groceries, the thinking goes, so why not prescription drugs? The health care industry has worried for years about whether the retail behemoth was coming for it, and those fears appeared to have been confirmed last summer when Amazon acquired the online pharmacy site.

Pillpack is still a relatively small player in the pharmacy world. It offers free shipping for medications — users are responsible only for their co-payments or other out-of-pocket costs. To expand significantly, it will have to work with entrenched players, like pharmacy-benefit managers, which operate their own mail-order pharmacies and may not be motivated to assist a newcomer like Amazon.