by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Jun 7, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Importation, Personal Drug Importation
Among citizens of high-income countries, Americans are exceptional in their struggle to afford medication. Citizens of Japan, for example, do not have to skip medication because of its price, or at least such instances are exceedingly rare. Compare that to 50 million Americans going without a prescription each year due to cost. It’s an obvious reason why so many Americans, relative to non-Americans, are searching online for prescription medication from other countries. Fortunately, they can compare drug prices among safe online pharmacies and avoid rogue sites.
For chronic conditions – even medically expensive ones like cancer and AIDS – citizens of high income countries, except America, almost never need to access an international online pharmacy because the medication at their local pharmacy is affordable. An excellent documentary on PBS shows just how affordable medical and pharmaceutical care is in Japan. This is not to endorse another countries’ healthcare system but to clearly identify and remind our readers that high drug prices as a barrier to care is a unique American crisis among rich countries.
When consumers outside America go online to buy medication, it’s usually to purchase lifestyle drugs, such as medication for erectile dysfunction or hair loss. Due to the nature of these products, some consumers would prefer anonymity by skipping the doctor’s visit to get a prescription and instead purchase them from rogue online pharmacies without a prescription. Rogue online pharmacies are more likely to sell counterfeit and substandard products, and making all consumers aware of this protects their health. Since cost is a barrier to medication for so many Americans, making them aware of lower cost alternatives internationally is good for their health, too.
How big are the overall price differences between countries? A chart from 2005 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), showing international drug price disparities, is very revealing. It shows that the U.S. spends about twice as much per person than the average for OECD countries. Since international drug price disparities have grown considerably since 2005 on brand name drugs, the disparity between American drug prices and international has grown more severe.
Drug prices are lower internationally primarily because foreign governments control pharmaceutical prices through a variety of policy interventions. For most prescription medications, particularly for maintenance conditions, this mitigates the need to seek out lower prices online internationally. In America the need persists more so than ever.
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | May 30, 2013 | Advocacy, Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies
More public interest and consumer groups are hopping on the bandwagon to defend online access to safe and affordable medication. As we reported a few weeks back, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) has applied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to administer a generic top level domain called “.Pharmacy” (dot pharmacy). NABP proposes to block all online pharmacies that fill orders internationally to Americans from obtaining a website that ends in .Pharmacy, including ones that are safe and approved by PharmacyChecker.com. NABP’s critics, identified below, view its application as an effort to curtail consumer purchases of lower cost medicine from outside the United States. One of their main concerns is that NABP’s application is funded by Merck and Eli Lilly – big pharma: a situation prone to major conflicts of interest.
To read more about this issue see our press release.
This NABP/ICANN issue can be very confusing so I offer the following explanation. ICANN is a non-profit organization that governs the world wide web system of domain names, such as .com, .org., and .edu. For a long time the available suffixes, called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that could be used for website names have been limited. Last year ICANN opened up a process by which companies and organizations could apply to act as registry – administrators – for new names, such as .career, .casino, .charity, etc. In theory, this could open up new opportunities for innovation and development over the Internet. However, a pharma-funded initiative to make the rules and govern the Internet in an area as critical as the distribution of prescription medication will serve only to protect business interests to the detriment of consumers.
David Moon from Demand Progress, an Internet freedom group and lead organization in battling the Stop Online Piracy Act, sums it up perfectly: “From our direct experience with NABP and its allies in Internet policy disputes, there is ample cause to believe the applicant seeks to control .pharmacy to the detriment of free speech & access to safe and affordable medication for consumers.”
Here is a list of the groups and people who have voiced opposition and concern about NABP’s application for .Pharmacy:
Canadian International Pharmacy Association (Tim Smith, President)
Demand Progress (David Moon, Program Director)
Knowledge Ecology International – KEI (James Love, Director)
Mature Voices Minnesota (Robert E. Hines, Board Chair)
PharmacyChecker.com (Tod Cooperman, MD, President and Gabriel Levitt, Vice President)
Public Citizen (Peter Maybarduk, JD, Global Access to Medicines Program Director)
Ram Kamath, PharmD (PharmacyChecker.com, Director of Pharmacy Policy and International Verifications).
RxRights.org (Lee Graczyk, Lead Organizer)
TodaysSeniorsNetwork.com (Daniel Hines)
Tagged with: Demand Progress, ICANN, NABP, pharmacy, RxRights
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | May 10, 2013 | Advocacy, Medication non-adherence, Skipping medications
The number of Americans not taking medication due to high drug prices – a public health crisis – has increased dramatically over the past decade. Last year, drug prices deterred 50 million Americans ages 19-64 from filling a prescription, a 28% increase since 2003 and 4% increase since 2010, according to the Commonwealth Fund’s 2012 Biennial Health Insurance Survey. The survey measures gaps in medical care due to cost, such as forgone doctors’ visits, medical tests, specialist care, and prescription medications. The prescription-use data for 2012 was derived from answers to the following question: In the last 12 months, was there any time when you did not fill a prescription for medicine because of the cost? This fifty million – a staggering figure – does not even include seniors or children who also did not fill a prescription due to cost.
Not surprisingly, the problems for the uninsured are much greater, especially for those with chronic conditions. Sixty percent of uninsured Americans with a chronic condition skipped taking medication in 2012 due to cost, compared to 14% of insured Americans. Overall, the figure was 28%; that’s 18 million out of sixty-six million adults with hypertension or high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, emphysema, lung disease, or heart disease who reported skipping medication.
As far as seniors skipping meds goes, a recent Walgreens survey may have some answers. It found that 37% of Medicare enrollees are concerned about their drug costs and 20% delay filling prescriptions or skip doses to manage costs. That’s almost an additional eight million (using U.S. Census data for 2011) Americans not adhering to prescriptions due to high drug prices. Walgreens attributes such dismal numbers to the fact that people are unaware of cost-saving alternatives, such as the fact that co-pays vary among pharmacies and limited knowledge of how Part D prescription plans work.
Other reasons seniors skip medication are because their Part D plans do not cover brand name medications prescribed by their doctors and the “donut hole,” a coverage gap in Medicare drug plans that has fortunately begun to close due to Obamacare .
We’re happy to note that the Commonwealth Fund’s report shows that more insured Americans under Obamacare in the years to come could alleviate medical cost problems for millions of Americans. We’ll explore in a future blog post new data on how Americans are addressing the problem of high drug prices.
Tagged with: Commonwealth Fund, Obamacare, walgreens
