Tag: Andy Slavitt

USA grapples with high drugs costs

 lancet cover 2Volume 386, Number  10009 
28 November 2015
WORLD REPORT   More Americans are getting health insurance, including coverage for prescription drugs, but high prices may make them inaccessible. Susan Jaffe, The Lancet’s Washington correspondent, reports.
 Patients in the USA pay more for prescription drugs than almost anywhere else in the world, forcing as many as one in four who can’t afford the high prices to go without their medicine last year, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. So even though more Americans have health insurance, the new therapies and cures that can prevent more expensive health complications might be out of reach.
After several well-publicised, huge spikes in drug prices—including Turing Pharmaceutical’s increase for pyrimethamine (marketed as Daraprim) from US$13·50 to $750 a pill—the problem is drawing unprecedented attention from nearly every quarter: the Obama Administration, Congress, state officials, health insurance companies, drug makers, as well as the physicians and their patients who have clamoured for help for years. It also surfaced during this month’s Democratic presidential debate.
Heather Block, a patient advocate from Delaware who spoke at a day-long pharmaceutical forum hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) earlier this month, pays $9800 a month for the drugs she takes to treat breast cancer that has spread to her liver and lungs. Although she has Medicare coverage, she is still responsible for a share of her medical expenses. “Innovation is meaningless if nobody can afford it”, she said. “I still face financial insecurity and eventually bankruptcy—if I live that long.”     [Continued here ]
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Don’t Just Renew Your Medicare Plan. Shopping Around Can Save Money.

By Susan Jaffe | October 15, 2015 | Kaiser Health News in collaboration with Money magazine

Ten years after a prescription drug benefit was added to Medicare, 39 million older or disabled AmerMoney 4icans have coverage to help pay for their medicine, including most of the 17 million with private insurance policies known as Medicare Advantage, an alternative to traditional Medicare.
The annual enrollmentmedicare-shop-KHN 101515 period for these private drug and Advantage plans for 2016 starts Thursday and runs through Dec. 7.
It pays to shop around. The monthly cost is increasing an average 26 percent for UnitedHealthcare’s AARP MedicareRx Saver Plus while the First Health Value Plus plan
is dropping an average 13 percent, according to an analysis of the 10 most popular drug plans by Avalere Health, a research firm.
Some actual costs may be even more dramatic. In Albany, N.Y., the price of a Cigna-HealthSpring drug plan is going up 36 percent, according to the StateWide Senior Action Council, a New York consumer group. [More in Kaiser Health News or Money magazine]
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