ARE YOU TAKING ALL YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS?
Patient prescriptions are down 13% this year. Americans now spend $286 billion dollars a year on prescription drugs. This is 10% of health care costs that amount to 2.26 trillion dollars. They take over 12 prescription drugs a year. There are 3.8 billion prescriptions filled annually since the paid medical prescription plan went into effect.
With loss of jobs and loss of senior savings, people are cutting down on which drugs they will continue to take and which they will not buy. Pain medicines are a must, but cholesterol drugs that don’t leave an impact that the patient sees are forgotten. Even the generic drugs are not affordable. Groceries and housing necessities take precedent and some drugs will have to wait.
The trend, if it continues, could have potentially profound medical implications. Controllable disease conditions will get out of control and our nation’s health care bill will certainly sky rocket.
People are screaming for regulation of prices. They are cutting pills in half and playing doctor by how they feel. There is probably over prescribing in the United States anyway, but we after all in a drug culture.
As long as you can get it free, why not fill all your prescriptions. For every complaint, the doctor prescribes a drug. Sometimes this leads to a new disease. A cortisone tablet helps inflammation, but now it causes indigestion, an ulcer, or sugar problem. All these things need new prescriptions, which leads to new side effects worse than the original problem.
We also need our left over pills from last year in our medicine cabinets in case we get diarrhea, an infection, or a headache. Lets play doctor!
There is no free lunch. We must pay for all this someway. Universal health care may be the answer. But where will the money come from? We spend $286 billion on pills now, what will it be when everyone can go to a doctor, anytime, and get a prescription for what ails them at the moment. TV drug advertising tells us what we need.
And the doctor visit, the Cat scans and MRIs, and heart monitoring costs certainly will not go down. We lost 2 trillion dollars in the market recently and we spend 2.6 trillion on health care now. Lets just print more money.
Perhaps our standard of health care might improve if we went back to 8 prescriptions a year like we did ten years ago. If the doctor talked to us, we might forgo some of these prescriptions. But talking takes time and who in medicine has that luxury today? We all need prescriptions but folks do we all need 12 a year?
Perhaps this recession will contain this growing monster. Lets evaluate how effective all our drugs really are. Maybe we can really get by with less than the 12 prescriptions we now take annually Source NY Times Oct 22, 2008
What do you think? Your comments are appreciated.
Visit www.drneedles.com for more medical blogging on controversial medical topics.
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