“Health insurance companies are currently revising their pricing systems for very expensive drugs and they are now requiring patients to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for prescriptions for drugs that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases.
“With the new pricing system, insurers have now abandoned the traditional arrangement in which patients pay a fixed amount for a prescription regardless of what the drug’s actual cost. Instead, now they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs. This percentage is usually 20 to 33 percent and obviously this can amount to thousands of dollars a month for some patients.”
Hartley continues: “It is not known how many patients are affected, but hundreds of drugs are now being priced this new way. These drugs are used to treat diseases that are fairly common, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, hepatitis C and some kinds of cancer. Unfortunately, there are no generic equivalents for these drugs, so patients are being forced to pay these prices or go without.”
This is not a new phenomenon, but anecdotal reports suggest it is increasingly rapidly — both in the number of insurers who employ this cost-splitting approach and in the number of high-priced drugs included in such plans.
I have a friend on a oral chemotherapy drug who, despite being fully insured through her employer, was still forced to pay thousands of dollars for her medication. Needless to say, this came as a shock to her. It’s hard enough to go through chemo without having to pay thousands of dollars for a few bottles of pills.
Insurers keep moving the goalposts on the definition of “being covered” in this country. Standards of coverage pale in comparison to what they were 20 or even 10 years ago. And yet the premiums continue to increase far more rapidly than the inflation rate.
If you’re forced into a situation where you must pay a high percentage of your drug costs rather than a flat co-pay, we encourage you to consider shopping at eDrugSearch.com as an alternative. And please feel free to join the discussion — we love letting people vent! — within the eDrugSearch.com Community.
It may be a mixed metaphor, but you get the point. This is how Georgia Congressman Jim Marshall describes the problem of high drug prices in this candid interview with Herbert Dennard.
We are in the process of updating our Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) based on community feedback, and I am enlisting your help as we prepare to incorporate a number of enhancements. I encourage all eDrugSearch.com visitors — including comparison shoppers, community participants and our blogger friends — to complete the following brief survey, which asks you to compare two potential SERP updates.
The poll will run until Sunday, May 18. Here are instructions for completing the survey:
1. Open Sample SERP Version 2 in a new window on your browser.
2. Open Sample SERP Version 3 in a second new window.
3. In your original window, click here to take the survey.
4. As you answer the survey questions, keep in mind that the sample SERP pages are not fully functional.
5. Finally: If you forget which sample SERP is which after you’ve opened them, remember that Sample SERP 2 is the one with a column-based organization and “Go To Store” buttons.
Thank you in advance for helping to make eDrugSearch.com the best experience possible for prescription drug consumers!
I keep hoping it will go away (after all, it’s been around for over a year), but I can’t seem to escape that two-minute-plus Celebrex ad with a bunch of freaky faceless people bicycling, drinking tea, painting fences, reading the newspaper, swimming with the fishes, dancing under the stars, and playing frisbee with the dog in slow motion. I guess I must be watching channels for the arthritis demo, like AMC, a little too often.
With the slo-mo and totally weird vibe of the ad, I’ve been thinking of pulling the ad into my video editing software and laying on a new soundtrack that would be more appropriate to the visuals. Here are my candidates:
1. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
2. Comfortably Numb
3. Stairway to Heaven
4. Hotel California
5. Bohemian Rhapsody (the length is about the same…)
6. Don’t Worry Be Happy (should be the theme song for all DTC ads)
I’m leaning toward Lucy at this point — if I ever get around to doing it. In the meantime, here’s a version of the Celebrex ad with a more ominous vibe.
Oh, c’mon — of course you do. A blister pack, if you’re unaware, is drug packaging where the tablet or capsule is mounted on a card under a plastic dome. Here’s the video:
Yeah, I know … the narrator sounds like he’s on the same pharmaceutical regimen as Paula Abdul. But it’s still informative, isn’t it?
Jo Hartley reports:
