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

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.

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

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