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Thursday, May 14th, 2015

Drug Costs Top $50K A Year For Half Million Americans

Author:     Bruce Japsen
Source:     Forbes
Publication Date:     5/13/2015 @ 12:00AM
 Link: Drug Costs Top $50K A Year For Half Million Americans
Stephan:   This is how criminally rapacious the pharmaceutical component of the Illness Profit System has become. This ought to be a national scandal. But Corporate media, which profits from it — consider how many drug commercials you see on T.V in say a normal news program — doesn't cover it. This unrestrained profit taking from drugs is one of the failures of Obamacare, which did nothing to alter the profit based model of U.S. healthcare.

SuperSpenders_Table1With the drug industry launching more expensive targeted therapies, the number of Americans with annual medication costs of more than $50,000 has jumped more than 60% to nearly 600,000, a new analysis shows.

The latest drug spending trend report from pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts ESRX +0.17% (ESRX) shows 576,000 Americans with annual medication costs of $50,000 or more. That’s a 63% increase in 2014 from 2013 when 352,000 Americans had such high costs.

While the number of patients with annual spending above $50,000 was just 0.2% of patients, the amount of drugs they and their health plans or employers paid for accounted for 16% of total spending, the analysis showed.

“The profile emerging from this research shows these patients are overwhelmingly taking specialty medications, and have multiple comorbidities, prescriptions and prescribers,” Dr. Glen Stettin, ExpressScripts’ senior vice president of clinical research and new solutions, said in a statement accompanying the analysis.

Express Scripts certainly has a vested interest in issuing […]

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