Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Indicator is 86%
That’s how much the rate of prescription abandonment rose over the last four years, as reporting on public radio's Marketplace this afternoon.
More and more Americans are in health plans with higher member cost share, and people are going into the pharmacy expecting to pay $20 for a prescription, and discovering it’s $40 or more. For many Americans, this is just too much to pay.
One of the interviewees noted that he also saw his patients deciding to skip physical therapy because of high copayments.
This is one of the bitter ironies of the increased coverage of health care reform. More Americans will be insured (mostly starting in 2014), but even those with “full” coverage often find that their insurance doesn’t cover them as it once did.
This is bad news for health. The pharmaceuticals introduced over the last decades represent quantum leaps in the treatment of HIV, depression, ulcer disease, asthma, diabetes, cholesterol and many cancers. However, these innovations are no good if people can’t afford them.
The answer for consumers is often generic medications –which can be purchased at a fraction of the cost of brand name medicines. Generic prescribing rates are currently around 70% in states with ‘mandatory substitution,’ where a physician must explicitly demand the brand or else the pharmacist must use a generic. However, closed health care systems can achieve an 80% generic rate, which dramatically lowers overall costs.
The public policy answer to high pharmaceutical costs is less clear. Possible answers include
- Price Controls: Most industrialized countries have some form of price control. As a result, drug costs are dramatically higher in the
- Antitrust enforcement: Consolidation in the industry leads to less price competition. (Pfizer just shelled out $2.6 billion for a generic drug maker, King Pharmaceuticals). Even more important in terms of promoting sane prescribing would be prohibiting cross-promotion of medications. This is when a company allows discounts on a popular medicine only if the pharmacy benefit manager (or health plan or employer) agrees to put other company products on a preferred list. This process helps keep actual prices opaque, and leads to higher costs.
- Patent Vigilance: Patent protection is why brand name medicines are so expensive. Congress has periodically offered further patent protection to the industry, and limiting patent protection would make the industry less profitable and less attractive to new investors while it would lower costs.
The rising abandonment rate is further indication we need to lower the costs of prescription medications. It won’t be easy to do so, but there are a lot of people wheezing away who can’t afford their asthma inhalers. We don’t want them to be hospitalized, and an inhaler is a good deal compared to an emergency department visit
