Patients Do Not Buy Some Prescription Drugs Because Of Their Cost

Patients Do Not Buy Some Prescription Drugs Because Of Their Cost.
In these perplexing remunerative times, even people with health insurance are leaving formula 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 fettle trouble costs annually, according to Dr William Shrank, an assistant professor of drug at Harvard Medical School and lead author of a new study. "A little over 3 percent of prescriptions that are delivered to the druggist's aren't getting picked up".

So "And, in more than half of those cases, the medicament wasn't refilled anywhere else during the next six months". Results of the study are published in the Nov 16, 2010 child of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Shrank and his colleagues reviewed details on the prescriptions bottled for insured patients of CVS Caremark, a pharmacy benefits manager and nationwide 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' middling long time was 47 years, and 60 percent were female, according to the study. The norm 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 mislay a prescription, according to the study. If a co-pay was $50 or over, populace were 4,5 times more no doubt to abandon the prescription adding that it's "imperative to talk to your doctor and pharmacologist 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 dissolute just 1,4 percent of the time, according to the study. People were also a lot less likely to leave generic medications at the Rather formal counter, according to Shrank.