by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Mar 9, 2017 | Advocacy, Drug Importation, Drug Prices, Online Pharmacies, Personal Drug Importation, Pharmaceutical Industry
Will drug price angst unite America?
The executive director of Prescription Justice, Jodi Dart, published an op-ed in Morning Consult earlier this week called The Rx Rip-Off. The piece does contain Ms. Dart’s opinions but there are also some facts reported, ones based on a Zogby poll on drug prices commissioned by Prescription Justice. The poll shows that 90% of Americans are united on the need for the government to take action to make medication more affordable! As an incredible coincidence, President Trump tweeted just hours after the op-ed was published that “Pricing for the American people will come way down!”
There’s a lot in this poll that I look forward to writing about but let’s consider some of the broad findings of the poll:
- 75.5% of Americans agree with President Trump that the “drug companies are getting away with murder:
- 29.6% of Americans say they have not filled a prescription because of cost.
- 4.2% say they currently get prescription medication from a Canadian or other international online pharmacy.
- 77% of respondents who had an opinion on the issue of importation laws (522 out of 674) supported reforms so that consumers could lawfully purchase medicines from Canada or other countries.
- Only 15% of respondents were actually against legalizing personal drug importation (23% of those who had an opinion).
Source: Zogby Analytics, margin of error +/- 3.1%: http://prescriptionjustice.org/Prescription_Justice_Zogby_Poll_Data_Feb_2017.pdf.
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Tagged with: jodi dart, morning consult, poll, prescription justce, public opinion, trump, zogby
by Gabriel Levitt, President, PharmacyChecker.com and Prescription Justice | Sep 30, 2016 | Advocacy, Drug Prices, Policy, Politics
What Americans think about drug prices…
A new poll by Kaiser Family Foundation found that 44 million Americans find it difficult to afford medication. Also, 77% of Americans believe drug prices are unreasonable, up from 72% last year. On the other hand, most Americans did not have trouble affording their medications. Of the 55% of Americans who take medication, 73% say they can afford them, 26% say that its’ difficult. (I’m not sure why that doesn’t round to 100%).
Overwhelming majorities of Americans support policies, legislative reforms in most cases, to bring down prescription drug prices and have access lower cost medications from Canada. The most popular policy would be forcing pharmaceutical companies to be transparent about their pricing of medication. The next two most favored policies are allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and expanding personal importation of lower cost medication from Canada.
The Kaiser Poll was a nationally representative random survey of 1204 adults living in the U.S. Public and voter opinions on drug prices are just one part of the survey, albeit the main one: but the poll also covers voter opinions and data about health insurance generally, Obamacare, premiums, and deductibles.
The Kaiser Poll has very interesting political analyses relating to how a person will vote in the upcoming presidential election and the candidates’ positions on prescription drug costs and other healthcare issues. If interested, the positions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are summed up on the blog of Prescription Justice. Both Clinton and Trump support expanding access to lower cost imported medications through personal importation, but Clinton has a much more ambitious plan, which is very much congruous with public opinion among Democratic and Republican voters.
Tagged with: Kaiser, poll
