After a 2 year hiatus I am returning to the blogsphere in order to expiate my frustration at not expressing myself in written language. The proximate reason for doing so that I am reading Jon Meacham,s book : The Art of Power; the life of Thomas Jefferson. This is a significant work that I highly recommend anyone interested in romance, history, Jefferson, or gifted writing. Jefferson left a legacy of his thoughts through the copious letters he wrote to friends and romantic acquaintances. Remarkably much of this writing has been preserved and Meacham has done an incredible job of collating these works into a history of the US as well as a history of a great leaders life. I do not know how muchpf this is romanticized, but it has charmed me and captivated my imagination. And so it begins that I wish to communicate thoughts, though in no way to be compared with Jefferson or any other accomplished writer, to be preserved in the cloud.
While my past writing was often social as well as medical in context, I trust this writing will be more social and interpretive of my own thoughts in the present. Regardless of how I evolve I reserve the right to change my mind, regardless of whether the facts change or not. Should anyone choose to go on this ride with me I hope it will at the least be entertaining.
Til then ...
The Fiddler's New Roof
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The Wealthy vs The Middle Class Drug Insurance Pla
And now we
come to the second part of our story: the two-tiered system of mandated
allowable prescription drugs. Actually this is a multi-tiered system as each
insurer is legally able to create its own list of approved drugs (two tiered
refers to drugs the more wealthy can purchase through their insured
prescription drug plans vs less wealthy people who have more restrictive plans).
What all of these approved lists have in common is cost control, with minimal
regard for patient care. What all of these approved lists have in common is
disrespect for doctor prescribing decisions. What all of these systems
incorporate is an appreciation that young doctors tend to prescribe more
costly, newer drugs most often determined by an educational system that
indoctrinates doctors-in-training to believe that newer is better. What all of
these systems incorporate is a realization that patients come to doctors with a
belief that what is newer is better. “Is the new medicine stronger than the old
one?” asked the patient. “The new drug is different
from the old drug and stronger may not be better” I replied. “Just as eating
one fruit might satisfy hunger better than another without being stronger, its
advantage lies in its being different.”
But I
digress… . Patients now have two quandaries when obtaining prescribed drugs.
The first is the limitation of allowed drugs on their prescriptions plan. Not
infrequently an excluded drug may have quickened recovery from a disease
process with fewer side effects. This is the essence of the battle between
Gilead and Abbvie as Gilead has the more efficacious drug with the least side
effects for treating hepatitis C but Abbvie has a cost advantage. The second is
the co-pay which is part of patient prescription drug plans. Patients are
confused between what their co-pay mandates them to pay and the cost of the
drug. In the Medicare population this frequently results in patients being told
by pharmacists what the list price of the drug is as a preface to what they
owe. The natural response by the patient is anger that the drug is expensive
even though the patient cost is much lower than the list price.
I judge that
it is not unlikely that insurers have contracts with pharmacies and/or with
pharmaceutical companies to limit the cost of specified drugs so that
communicating the list price of a drug is not relevant to the prescription in
question. In this era of confrontation and misinformation each participant: the
patient, the pharmacist, and the pharmaceutical company have an agenda which
ultimately inflames public perception.
Two other
variables alter the public’s ability to obtain cost-effective medication. The
first is the sheer amount of paper-work necessary to complete a prescription
for a slew of medications which are proven efficacious but which cost more than
the majority of medications. The irony here is that the cost of the medicine
may be a fraction of the cost of treating with an inferior set of medications.
An excellent example is hepatitis C which can be treated at a cost of 85,000.00
vs cost of lifetime care of a patient at more than 500,000.00. Similar examples
can be given for psoriasis and arthritis. The second variable is the
obfuscation of cost of medications by pharmaceutical companies that provide
coupons for patients which limit the patient’s co-pay. The coupons fail to
state that the purpose is to increase sales at the expense of insurers who must
pay the balance owed on a more expensive drug.
In summary
there are no heroes in these games, only selfish participants. Patients, doctors,
insurers, pharmacies, and pharmaceutical companies each have their own
self-interests. Yet it is axiomatic that from overcoming obstacles comes
innovation. This is no less true in the medical therapeutic field. Next blog:
inexpensive innovations in medical therapy, or, Back to the Future
Friday, January 9, 2015
Why Your Medicine Costs So Much: Thank you Senators Kennedy et. al.
The late
Senator Ted Kennedy, like most senators a self-aggrandizing hypocrite, was also
a savvy politician and ultimately an effective legislator. In an egregious
moment which shall stand in the halls of my memory, so long as it may continue
to function, Senator Kennedy passed legislation which in retrospect was a
tawdry attempt to assuage his more left-leaning followers, but which resulted
in one of the most significant attacks on patient care in the history of my
life. To quote Mark Twain, “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in
the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing”. And the thing the
Senator promised not to do was to promote an unhealthy alliance between young
doctors-in-training and pharmaceutical companies.
Prompted by
a friend who called to complain that he had just moved to a new city and had
developed a consuming case of jock-itch, I was moved to consider what had
become of physician concern for patient welfare. Not knowing physicians in his
new locale my friend searched the internet for the name of a dermatologist and
was promptly given an appointment. Performing a cursory visual exam, sans any
testing, the doctor concluded that my friend had a fungus infection of the
groin. The dermatologist, having recently left the cocoon of a university
training program, prescribed what-to-her was an appropriate and modern topical
cream therapy. When the patient arrived at the pharmacy he was told the cost of
the cream was 300.00. Incredulous, he asked if his medical insurance would
cover its cost and was told the insurance had already covered 200.00 and the
rest was his responsibility! The total cost of a tube of this miracle cream was
500.00. I responded to his lament by recommending an over-the-counter
anti-fungal cream which cost 12.00!
Getting back
to Senator Kennedy, the Senator deemed that pharmaceutical company gifts to
medical students was influencing their neophyte prescribing patterns and worse,
might create a relationship of indebtedness which would corrupt the psyche of
these young doctors forever. To wit, Eli Lilly Company could no longer
distribute doctor bags to medical students completing their second year of medical
school and other companies could no longer sponsor trips to major medical
meetings for senior residents. (I was in the last class of medical students to
receive said physician bag and with no sense of disingenuousness have a great
affection for the bag and its history of having accompanied me over more than 4
decades of clinical practice. I rarely prescribe Eli Lilly products because
most of their products do not fall into my therapeutic armamentarium.)
Henceforth,
the pharmaceutical industry would have to find other ways to communicate with
medical students and physicians. Furthermore, as government funding of research
would wither, the pharmaceutical industry was asked to bear the burden of drug research
with the caveat that monetary gains from such research would be considered ill
begotten. As these congressmen pandered to the populist cause, they failed to
see the unintended consequences of knowledge deficits and loss of ingenuity
that would characterize the next 3 generations of physicians. With little
information in basic science and in pharmacology physicians increasingly
adhered to the principal that newer is better. The pharmaceutical industry
reverted to a more passive –aggressive posture of reformulating existing drugs
and packaging them as ever more expensive products. The liability risks of new
drug formulations became simply too expensive to justify new drug research.
(This resulted in creating what we now term the biotechnology industry.)
Economic and bureaucratic pressures on physicians and academia alike produced
ever more expediencies in physician education. Ask any credible drug rep and
they will tell you that only rarely do physicians want information regarding
pharmacology and rely on drug advertising to influence their prescribing of new
products. Hence young physicians are preoccupied with new drug formulations
which are reformulations of older drugs sold at ever increasing cost.
Beware
Senator Kennedy. You knew not what you asked for and we are paying for it in
spades.
Next blog will
discuss the two tiered economic system of medicinal drug distribution based on
how much premium the consumer can pay for medical insurance.
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