Tag: prescription drugs

Americans’ Challenges with Health Care Costs

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/americans-challenges-with-health-care-costs/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

  • About half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care costs, and one in four say they or a family member in their household had problems paying for health care in the past 12 months. Younger adults, those with lower incomes, adults in fair or poor health, and the uninsured are particularly likely to report problems affording health care in the past year.
  • The cost of health care can lead some to put off needed care. One in four adults say that in the past 12 months they have skipped or postponed getting health care they needed because of the cost. Notably six in ten uninsured adults (61%) say they went without needed care because of the cost.
  • The cost of prescription drugs prevents some people from filling prescriptions. About one in five adults (21%) say they have not filled a prescription because of the cost while a similar share say they have instead opted for over-the-counter alternatives. About one in ten adults say they have cut pills in half or skipped doses of medicine in the last year because of the cost.
  • Those who are covered by health insurance are not immune to the burden of health care costs. About four in ten insured adults worry about affording their monthly health insurance premium, and 48% worry about affording their deductible before health insurance kicks in. Indeed, large shares of adults with employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) and those with Marketplace coverage rate their insurance as “fair” or “poor” when it comes to their monthly premium and to out-of-pocket costs to see a doctor.
  • Health care debt is a burden for a large share of Americans. About four in ten adults (41%) report having debt due to medical or dental bills including debts owed to credit cards, collections agencies, family and friends, banks, and other lenders to pay for their health care costs, with disproportionate shares of Black and Hispanic adults, women, parents, those with low incomes, and uninsured adults saying they have health care debt.
  • Notable shares of adults still say they are worried about affording medical costs such as unexpected bills, deductibles, and long-term care services for themselves or a family member. Additionally, about half of adults would be unable to pay an unexpected medical bill of $500 in full without going into debt.

Author(s): Lunna Lopes, Marley Presiado, and Liz Hamel

Publication Date: 21 Dec 2023

Publication Site: Kaiser Family Foundation

Overdoses soared even as prescription pain pills plunged/Highest death rates hit counties where doses of pain pills per person had been top in nation

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/09/12/us-overdose-deaths-opioid-crisis/

Excerpt:

The number of prescription opioid pain pills shipped in the United States plummeted nearly 45 percent between 2011 and 2019, new federal data shows, even as fatal overdoses rose to record levels as users increasingly used heroin, and then illegal fentanyl.

The data confirms what’s long been known about the arc of the nation’s addiction crisis: Users first got hooked by pain pills saturating the nation, then turned to cheaper and more readily available street drugs after law enforcement crackdowns, public outcry and changes in how the medical community views prescribing opioids to treat pain.

The drug industry transaction data, collected by the Drug Enforcement Administration and released Tuesday by attorneys involved in the massive litigation against opioid industry players, reveals that the number of prescription hydrocodone and oxycodone pills peaked in 2011 at 12.8 billion pills, and dropped to fewer than 7.1 billion by 2019. Shipments of potent 80-milligram oxycodone pills dropped 92 percent in 2019 from their peak a decade earlier.

Many of the counties with the highest fentanyl death rates — in hard-hit states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio — started out with alarmingly high doses of prescription pills per capita, according to a Washington Post analysis of the DEA data and federal death records.

Counties with the highest average doses of legal pain pills per person from 2006 to 2013 suffered the highest death rates in the nation over the subsequent six years.

….

Annual overall overdose deaths reached a grim milestone in 2021, surpassing 100,000 for the first time in U.S. history. More than 110,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2022, two-thirds of whom succumbed to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Author(s): Rich, Steven; Ovalle, David

Publication Date: 12 Sep 2023

Publication Site: Washington Post

Social Media Is Fueling Enthusiasm for New Weight Loss Drugs. Are Regulators Watching?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/social-media-is-fueling-enthusiasm-for-new-weight-loss-drugs-are-regulators-watching/

Excerpt:

Competition to claim a market that could be worth $100 billion a year for drugmakers alone has triggered a wave of advertising that has provoked the concern of regulators and doctors worldwide. But their tools for curbing the ads that go too far are limited — especially when it comes to social media. Regulatory systems are most interested in pharma’s claims, not necessarily those of doctors or their enthused patients.

Few drugs of this type are approved by the FDA for weight loss — they include Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy. But after shortages made that treatment harder to get, patients turned to other pharmaceuticals — like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro — that are approved only for Type 2 diabetes. Those are often used off-label — though you wouldn’t hear that from many of their online boosters.

The drugs have shown promising clinical results, Jaisinghani and her peers emphasize. Patients can lose as much as 15% of their body weight. Novo Nordisk is sponsoring research to examine whether Wegovy causes reductions in the rate of heart attacks for patients with obesity.

The medications, though, come at a high price. Wegovy runs patients paying cash at least $1,305 a month in the Washington, D.C., area, according to a GoodRx search in late March. Insurers only sometimes cover the cost. And patients typically regain much of their lost weight after they stop taking it.

Author(s):Darius Tahir and Hannah Norman

Publication Date: 18 Apr 2023

Publication Site: KFF Health News

Brand-Name Drug Prices: The Key Driver of High Pharmaceutical Spending in the U.S.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/2021/nov/brand-name-drug-prices-key-driver-high-pharmaceutical-spending-in-us

Graphic:

Excerpt:

High U.S. drug prices are a financial strain for patients, employers, and state and federal governments. In the following charts, we present the findings from a number of studies on prescription drug costs and spending in the United States with other high-income countries to reveal the main culprit: high U.S. prices for brand-name drugs.

The data for this chartpack come from the following sources: the Commonwealth Fund’s 2020 International Health Policy Survey; 1980–2020 pharmaceutical spending data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); 2020 individual-level administrative claims or registry data compiled by the International Collaborative on Costs, Outcomes, and Needs in Care (ICCONIC); and IQVIA’s MIDAS database for 33 OECD member countries for 2018.

Author(s): Aimee Cicchiello, Lovisa Gustafsson

Publication Date: 17 November 2021

Publication Site: The Commonwealth Fund

Charging patients just $10 more for medications leads to more deaths

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22276166/us-health-insurance-out-of-pocket-costs-research

Excerpt:

Researchers at Harvard University and the University of California Berkeley examined what happened when Medicare beneficiaries faced an increase in their out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs. They found that a 34 percent increase (a $10.40 increase per drug) led to a significant decrease in patients filling their prescriptions — and, eventually, a 33 percent increase in mortality.

The rise in deaths resulted from people indiscriminately cutting back on medications when they had to pay more for them, including drugs for heart disease, hypertension, asthma, and diabetes.

….

It is difficult to come up with a study design that directly measures the effect of health insurance on health outcomes. These researchers overcame that problem by tracking the prescription benefits for people newly enrolling in Medicare when they turn 65. People with birthdays earlier in the year would be more likely to face higher out-of-pocket costs than people with birthdays later in the year, given the way Medicare’s benefits are designed. By comparing the data between the different age groups, using as a baseline an estimate of how much the patients would have been expected to spend without any cost-sharing, the researchers were able to isolate the effect of cost-sharing on the use of prescription drugs and mortality rates for patients.

Author(s): Dylan Scott

Publication Date: 10 February 2021

Publication Site: Vox