Credit: jedmorey.com
TRENTON, N.J. — U.S. spending on prescription drugs soared last year, driven up primarily by costly breakthrough medicines, manufacturer price hikes and a surge from millions of people newly insured due to the Affordable Care Act.
Spending rose 13 percent, the biggest jump since 2001, to a total of $374 billion, according to a report released Tuesday by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. After accounting for population growth and inflation, the increase equaled 10 percent.
A record 4.3 billion prescriptions were filled in 2014, many of them for inexpensive generic pills going to patients now insured through Medicaid in states that expanded eligibility for the government health program for the poor and disabled. The number of prescriptions covered by Medicaid rose by nearly 17 percent, and that increase accounted for 70 percent of growth in the number of prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies. Another sign of the Affordable Care Ac’s impact was that prescriptions paid for in cash, normally filled by uninsured people, declined 5.5 percent.
As you know, I recently had knee surgery.. and as someone who rarely takes meds, and has always practiced alternative remedies whenever possible, being in a hospital was not something I wanted to undergo. To be pumped full of stuff that I shy away from. However, it had to be done, as I refuse to live life in a chair. My doc is from Taiwan and is considered one of the best. The nurses all raced to my room to see the incision. They think he’s a miracle worker. He grew up with eastern medicine and came to America at the age of ten where he soon developed an interest in becoming a doctor. He went to John Hopkins and another university. His wife is a doctor. He doesn’t practice alternative, but there are traces of his childhood that show up occasionally. He’s not one to talk about it much. That said, we had an brief few moments today. When you’re in post op and can’t move for more than 20 minutes per day for days on end – ten in the morning and ten in the afternoon and the pain level is high, they feed you opiates because your body needs to rest to heal. They also give you various meds to ward off constipation, and if they don’t work, you get a catheter. Some time ago, someone in the hospital came up with a recipe, a mix of herbs, prunes, etc…apparently it was a tasty pudding like substance. Post op patients would take it instead of big pharma meds. I asked the doctor today what happened. (I’d recently been given the recipe for this from a woman who’d been a nurse at the hospital and was now working in rehab. My physician rolled his eyes. He said, yes I know what you’re talking about. “Don’t get me started,” he added, rolling his eyes. Apparently, it had been dropped, as big pharma with medicare and the insurance companies wanted their traditional meds used. The profit machine at work! I could go on about big pharma, having rsearched it for a feature film with a NYT writer and Dr. Sydney Wolfe, who fed us information. He’s the Ralph Nader of medicine/big pharma and at on time worked for the FDA. Scary stuff. And it’s time we all started talking about this, lobbying about this… It ain’t the $$ in the end, it’s the sheer number of people who make themselves heard.