High Prescription Costs Leaves Americans Going Without

High Prescription Costs Prevent 1 in 5 from Taking Medication

Posted on Oct 19, 2011 in Prescription Cost by PayingThePrice-Contributor 0 Comments

How High Prescription Costs are Preventing 1 in 5 Americans from Taking Their Prescription Medicine.

A large portion of Americans – as many as one in five – don’t take the medications their doctor has prescribed because they can’t afford the prescription high cost, according to a recent survey of people visiting an urban emergency room conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

The results, which were published in the journal “Academic Emergency Medicine,” show that more than 20 percent of those surveyed said they had previously not taken a prescribed medication on account of the high prescription cost. Another 5 percent of those surveyed said they were worried they might not be able to pay for medications in the future.

These concerns over prescription costs have also led to a growing number of people walking away from their prescriptions at the pharmacy counter.

A Wolters Kluwer Pharma Solutions review of 80 million insurance claims data that this so-called abandonment – when a patient doesn’t purchase or pick up a prescription that was filled and packaged by a pharmacist – was up 55 percent in the second quarter of 2010, compared with four years earlier.

Officials from Wolters Kluwer say this trend is being driven in part by rising co-pays for many drugs and increasing enrollment in high-deductible insurance plans that require patients to pay high out-of-pocket costs before insurance kicks in. The average co-pay for brand-name drugs like Lipitor rose to $28 a prescription in 2010, an 87 percent increase from 2000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

For other medications, both generic and brand name, the prescription costs’ co-pays can be as high as $100.

Many medical experts have long considered prescription drug use to be immune to financial pressures since people get sick regardless of the strength of the economy. However, growing evidence has shown that prescription costs have increasingly become a major factor as millions of Americans struggle to make ends meet during the recession.