Patients Do Not Buy Some Prescription Drugs Because Of Their Cost

Patients Do Not Buy Some Prescription Drugs Because Of Their Cost.
In these muscular commercial times, even people with health insurance are leaving medication medications at the pharmacy because of high co-payments. This costs the pharmacy between $5 and $10 in processing per prescription, and across the United States that adds up to about $500 million in additional condition sorrow costs annually, according to Dr William Shrank, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical at Harvard Medical School and lead author of a new study. "A little over 3 percent of prescriptions that are delivered to the Rather formal aren't getting picked up".

So "And, in more than half of those cases, the instruction wasn't refilled anywhere else during the next six months". Results of the study are published in the Nov 16, 2010 consummation of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Shrank and his colleagues reviewed facts on the prescriptions bottled for insured patients of CVS Caremark, a pharmacy benefits manager and citizen retail pharmacy chain. CVS Caremark funded the study.

The study period ran from July 1, 2008 through September 30, 2008. More than 10,3 million prescriptions were filled for 5,2 million patients. The patients' common life-span was 47 years, and 60 percent were female, according to the study. The mean family income in their neighborhoods was $61762.

Of the more than 10 million prescriptions, 3,27 percent were abandoned. Cost appeared to be the biggest driver in whether or not someone would take leave of a prescription, according to the study. If a co-pay was $50 or over, subjects were 4,5 times more probably to abandon the prescription adding that it's "imperative to talk to your doctor and druggist to try to identify less expensive options, rather than abandoning an expensive medication and going without".

Drugs with a co-pay of less than $10 were depraved just 1,4 percent of the time, according to the study. People were also a lot less likely to leave generic medications at the old-fashioned apothecary counter, according to Shrank.