Wishing you affordable medicine and food this Thanksgiving!

When it comes to healthcare, and especially prescription drugs, 62% of Americans are concerned with costs. In the richest country in the world, it saddens me to report that accessing food — and eating more healthy foods — is a big problem, too.

This Thanksgiving it’s important to consider and stand with the millions of Americans who have to decide whether or not they will eat the food they want or take the medicine they need. Over 30% of Americans delay buying food or buy less food so that they can pay for medical and prescription drug expenses. That’s according to an annual survey about food purchasing behavior by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) conducted earlier this year.

This is not necessarily a hunger issue, although hunger in America is a problem. The IFIC study shows that 50% Americans sometimes buy less healthy food because it’s more affordable. Those less healthy diets lead to negative health outcomes, such as obesity, and more prescription drug spending!

A Commonwealth Fund survey showed 18% of Americans aged 19-64 did not fill a prescription in 2016. In my role with the non-profit organization Prescription Justice, we used that data and other survey data focused on people 65 and older to discover that 45 million Americans did not fill a prescription because of cost in 2016.

This is entirely unacceptable for America. What is worse is that even with a strong economy and unemployment at almost a 50-year low, affording medicine and healthy food is still difficult for so many families.

I hope that the work of PharmacyChecker to provide useful information on affording medicines and advocating for patients helps make it easier for Americans to afford both food and medicine – and to have a very, very Happy Thanksgiving.