Yes, you can stop in at boutique healthcare offices for under a $100 per visit, but what happens when you need that prescription filled?

City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen is pushing for Seattle to join nine other Washington cities–Tacoma, Shoreline, Sammamish, Puyallup, Auburn, Marysville, Burien, Airway Heights, and Union Gap– in participating in the National League of Cities Prescription Discount Card program. In other cities, the average discount has worked out to about 23 percent off the regular retail price for medication. “I expect that this program can begin in Seattle by early April,” said Rasmussen.

The program is run by CVS Caremark, which has a relationship with tens of thousands of pharmacies across the U.S., including Walgreens and the in-store pharmacies of Safeway and QFC. (Walgreens offers its own Prescription Savings Club, which comes with an annual fee of $20 per individual, or $35 for the family. If you don’t realize enough savings to cover the fee, the difference is refunded.)

The NLC’s program is free, and would cost the City of Seattle nothing, save distribution of the cards to those who wanted it. It also applies to pet prescriptions.

You don’t need to be uninsured to benefit from the NLC program, as it may provide discounts on prescription drugs not covered by your insurance: “There is no enrollment form, no membership fee, and no restrictions or limits on the frequency of use.”

For a growing number of people, though, programs like these are the new face of uninsured healthcare. From 2008 to 2010, the number of uninsured people in Washington state grew by 180,000, says insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler. By the end of 2011, Washington state was estimated to have a million uninsured, or almost 15 percent of its total population. Uncompensated medical care–where medical bills simply weren’t paid or were written off as charity–exceeded $1 billion.