Older Americans dump drugs when payments stop: study
Reuters, September 11th, 2007
Some elderly Americans simply stop
taking their prescribed drugs when insurance plans cease paying
for them, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
And when the benefits reset at the beginning of a new year,
many fail to resume taking their drugs, the team at the
nonprofit Rand Corporation found.
The findings suggest the same may happen when patients
enrolled in Medicare's new "part D" prescription plan hit gaps
in coverage popularly known as the doughnut hole, they said.
"Prescription use falls significantly as patients reach
their benefit caps," said Geoffrey Joyce, a health economist
who led the study at the research organization.
"Most of the drugs we studied help prevent long-term
complications of chronic disease so there are likely to be
adverse health consequences for seniors who hit their caps."
Joyce and colleagues studied 60,000 retirees enrolled in a
private health plan offered by a large national employer in
2003 to 2005. They had a choice of two drug plans that offered
annual drug benefit caps of $1,000 or $2,500 and a third that
had no spending limit. Participants had a co-pay in each of the
plans.
Between 6 percent to 13 percent of the patients enrolled in
drug plans with caps reached their spending limits in each of
the years studied, with about half going uncovered for more
than 90 days.
Read more of this article.Medicare and Your Retirement: Learn what Medicare will cover during your retirement, and whether you
will need Supplemental Health Insurance to cover other potential
medical costs.