San Francisco, CA- A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the non-partisan watchdog arm of Congress, states that prescription drug prices did not increase for Medicare consumers when pharmaceutical companies gave the government discounts to help senior citizens deal with a gap in benefits known as the a€?doughnut hole.a€? GAO found that prices for brand-name drugs used by Medicare beneficiaries increased at a similar rate before and after the government required discounts in January 2011.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus stated, a€?This report shows how health reform is working to save seniors $4.8 billion and helping them afford their prescription drugs, closing the doughnut hole... We need to help seniors save every dollar they can and thata€™s exactly what the Affordable Care Act does a€" reducing seniorsa€™ out-of-pocket costs while providing more benefits.a€?
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has vowed to overturn the law if elected, even though in 2011, seniors saved about $2.16 billion through the program, as Department of Health and Human Services records show. The 2010 health care law requires a 50% discount on prescription drugs in the gap between traditional and catastrophic coverage in the Medicare drug benefit, or Part D.
As several critics of the law, such as the health insurance industry, worry that the discounts would push prescription costs up for those not within the gap to offset the manufacturer discounts, several members of Congress have asked GAO to investigate.
GAO found that from January 2007 to December 2010, 77 brand-name drugs increased 36% for those within the coverage gap, or before the discount program began, and 35% for those not within the gap. From December 2010 to December 2011, after the program was in place, they increased 13% in both categories. GAOa€™s findings also mirrored the findings of HHS, though each agency used a different reporting method.
Jim Esquea, assistant secretary for legislation at HHS, stated that Medicare a€?will continue to manage this program aggressively to ensure that brand-name discounts are applied accurately and timely.a€?
Ia€™ve been around the pharma industry practically all my life - from the days that pharma was coming out with one blockbuster drug after another to now when the industry is going through some massive changes. Recently, I signed up for a meetup in NYC thata€™s going to cover the topic of Pharma 2.0. During the signup process I was asked, a€?how is the pharma industry changing?a€? Obviously, the pharma industry has already changed a ton in a number of areas, but some of the trends that I believe will continue are shrinking sales forces and disruption of existing marketing strategies.
Ita€™s no news that sales forces across the industry have been cut by 15% to 30% across the top drug makers. This reflects a few trends - doctors / practices refusing to see sales reps, doctors increasingly deferring to peer journals and online tools to obtain information on medications, and a number of blockbusters going generic. This is supported by the fact that 40% of primary care physicians today do not see sales reps and almost half of the visits made by reps to general practitioners were less than five minutes last year.
So one has to ask if doctors are refusing to see sales reps, how does pharma communicate the important stuff such as information on new therapies and the savings cards that we offer on our site to doctors and their patients? Well for one, instead of spending millions on untargeted TV ads, pharma needs marketing tools that conveys information in a digital, targeted, and low cost way.
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