Patients may seem to benefit from the proposed co-pay legislation but health care costs and taxes actually skyrocket as Pharma tries to pass along the cost of expensive brand name drugs that may not even be necessary and are often less effective than cheaper drugs. Some don't work at all.
An example of how Pharma is trying to play the co-pay card for its revenue stream is seen in a recent article JAMA , called "Out-of-Pocket Medication Costs and Use of Medications and Health Care Services Among Children With Asthma." Increased co-pay is resulting in less use of the asthma "controller medications" say the authors, who have links to Pfizer, Novartis and Bristol-Myers Squibb, three large drug companies. Asthma controller medications are drugs added on top of rescue inhalers or inhaled corticosteroids like Advair, Singulair, Symbicort, and Accolate. But data published by Medco, the nation's largest pharmacy benefit manager, says the controller drugs reduce neither trips to the ER or hospitalizations when taken by a large amount of patients. Worse--some reports say the controller asthma medications actually make asthma worse.
Do we really need laws written by Pharma to help "buy" drugs that may be worthless or even make us worse? END
Martha Rosenberg's first book, Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, was published last week.
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