- Center on Health Equity & Access
- Clinical
- Health Care Cost
- Health Care Delivery
- Insurance
- Policy
- Technology
- Value-Based Care
Seniors Ration Spending on Drugs as Costs Rise in Weak Economy
U.S. senior citizens are filling fewer prescriptions for drugs as out-of-pocket costs rise in a weak economy, undercutting a record level of new product introductions by drug companies, industry researchers said.
Dispensed prescriptions to patients 65 and older declined 3.1 percent in 2011, compared with a 2.7 percent dip in 2010, according to a study released today by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in Parsippany, New Jersey. For all age groups, prescriptions fell 1.1 percent last year.
The economy and increased cost-sharing requirements are causing people to make fewer doctor visits and fill fewer orders for pills, IMS said. There probably won’t be improvement in 2012 as the economic recovery and population growth aren’t moving fast enough to boost spending on brand-name drugs, said Michael Kleinrock, the institute’s research development director.
Read the full story: http://hcp.lv/Hjhu4m
Source: Bloomberg
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Read More
