 |
 |
|
|
New York City began offering a new card on Wednesday that lets people buy prescription drugs at big discounts, a step that could potentially increase drug sales and ease strains on the city’s public hospitals.
Residents, tourists, commuters, and people who already have insurance, are all eligible for the new and free BigAppleRx cards, regardless of age, income, or citizenship, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters.
Discounts are expected to average 47 percent. Patients with diabetes could save as much as $831 a year on generic prescription drugs while asthma sufferers could save $667 on inhaler drugs.
Some localities are years ahead of New York City in offering discount drug cards. Neighboring Nassau County, for example, says its program began in 2004 and it saves residents 24 percent off most retail prescriptions and up to 50 percent on generic drugs.
Many pharmacies around the nation offer similar discount cards; HealthTrans Access, which will run the city’s program, has already signed up 10.6 million people around the country.
About 2,000 drugstores in New York City — 85 percent of the total — are willing to offer the discounts in return for attracting more business from shoppers who also might buy other items while in the stores, Bloomberg said.
Last year, more than 800,000 New Yorkers said they did not fill a prescription because they could not pay for it, said Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs. Even New Yorkers who have health insurance may have plans that do not cover drugs.
If the new cards enable these individuals to afford the prescription drugs they need, they might be able to avoid seeking emergency treatment at one of the city’s 11 public hospitals, a mayoral aide said.
New York City has one of the nation’s biggest Medicaid programs, whose recipients already get the benefit of lower drug prices. Still, the city’s public hospitals treat 450,000 people a year who lack insurance, said a spokeswoman for the hospital agency, the Health & Hospitals Corporation.
“A lot of our patients can get medication for $2,” she said. “But not all New Yorkers come to the Health and Hospitals Corporation; that’s the benefit of this card.”
For years, the finances of the Health & Hospitals Corporation have been under pressure, and its closing cash balance is expected to fall to $31 million in 2015 from $832 million in 2011, according to a fiscal watchdog.
The list of drug chains that will accept the new cards includes Target. The discount cards can be downloaded at www.bigapplerx.com or obtained by calling 311, the city’s help line.
Mail this post
Global sales growth of prescription drugs could be cut in half over the next five years as lucrative brands lose patent protection and cheaper generics and emerging markets become the only significant growth drivers, according to IMS Health
“Past patterns of spending offer few clues about the level of expected growth through 2015,” said Murray Aitken, an IMS Health executive whose division conducted the study.
“There are unprecedented dynamics at play, which are driving rapid shifts in the mix of spending by patients and payers between branded products and generics,” said Aitken, whose company tracks prescription drug sales and trends.
Average annual sales are expected to grow 3 to 6 percent during the period, reaching nearly $1.1 trillion by 2015. But the trend reflects a slowdown from annual growth of 6.2 percent seen during the past five years, the report said.
U.S. sales will grow only 0 to 3 percent a year over the period, while sales in Europe will rise 1 to 4 percent. Spending on branded drugs is expected to be little changed in such developed markets in 2015, with growth coming instead from higher demand for cheaper generic drugs.
A wave of new generics is approaching as an unprecedented number of big drugs lose U.S. patent protection by 2015, including Pfizer Inc’s $10 billion-a-year cholesterol fighter Lipitor, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co’s Plavix blood clot preventer and Eli Lilly and Co’s Zyprexa for schizophrenia.
Aitken said too few novel drugs are being approved to greatly offset lost sales of those facing the generic onslaught.
“We continue to be disappointed by the number of new chemical entities and biologics entering the market,” he said.
All told, cheaper generic formulations of the maturing drugs will produce $98 billion in net savings to insurers in developed countries through 2015.
“The U.S. share of global spending will decline from 41 percent in 2005 to 31 percent in 2015, while the share of spending from the top 5 European countries will decline from 20 percent to 13 percent,” the report said.
Meanwhile, it said spending will likely double over the next five years in emerging markets, to between $285 million and $315 million a year — approaching U.S. levels.
“Seventeen high growth emerging markets, led by China, will contribute 28 percent of total spending by 2015, up from only 12 percent in 2005,” the report said. It noted that growth will come primarily from generics.
Global spending on cancer drugs is expected to reach $75 billion by 2015, rising at a much slower rate than in the past five years because many newer and costly biotech treatments are already being widely used in developed markets.
But annual spending on diabetes medicines is expected to grow 4 to 7 percent through 2015, due largely to changing diets and lifestyles in developing countries that will increase the prevalence of Type II diabetes.
(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson, editing by Bernard Orr)
Mail this post
The German chemical and pharmaceutical company Bayer faces a US lawsuit on behalf of a teenager who died from a blood clot allegedly linked to its YAZ contraceptive.
Michelle Pfleger, an 18-year-old college student in North Carolina, died of cardiac arrest last September after taking YAZ, also known as Yasmin or Ocella, to treat acne, according to the complaint filed on Tuesday.
“One day she was a freshman at college so full of hope and promise and the next she was gone,” Pfleger’s mother, Joan Cummins said.
“I can only hope that by publicizing what happened to Michelle, I can keep another family from having to go through this.”
The family’s attorney, Wendy Fleishman called YAZ a “a dangerous prescription drug sold without adequate warnings about the risks of serious and fatal injuries.”
“Bayer failed to warn doctors and patients that YAZ poses a greater risk of serious side effects than previous generations of oral contraceptives,” she added.
Last month two studies in the British Medical Journal found that drugs like YAZ and Yasmin — which contain the hormone drospirenone — increase the risk of serious blood clots three-fold or two-fold compared to earlier-generation oral contraceptives.
Bayer criticized the results of the studies at the time, insisting that side effects were rare.
The official YAZ website says the drug is associated with “increased risks of several serious side effects, including blood clots, stroke, and heart attack.”
Mail this post