Comparison of Prescription Drug Costs in UK and US
The total cost paid for statins – drugs used to lower cholesterol, by people below 65 years of age who hold private insurance in the United States continued to exceed the cost paid by the UK government for the same drug by three-fold, new research reveals.
This information was taken from the Boston University’s Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, which was designed to conduct a comparison between the cost of prescription drugs between the United States and the United Kingdom. Initial results were reported in 2005 and the updated results (for year 2009) will be published this week in the journal Pharmacotherapy.
The comparative study involves 1.2 million people in each country taking statin. In the US, the estimated number of prescribed statin went up to 125,000 in 2009 from 103,000 in 2005. On the other hand, the figure increased to 105,000 from 67,000 in the UK for the same timeframe. In the US, private health insurance companies paid a total of $87 million in year 2005 to cover for the cost of statin prescriptions.
The cost lowered down when a generic formulation of statin was made available in the name of simvastin (Zocor). For over the past decade, about 180 million people 65 years and below have been covered by private health insurance companies. From $3.91, the cost of the drug per pill fell to $0.20 in 2009. So despite the increase in the number of people taking statin in the US, the total cost paid for the medication dropped to $47 million in 2009. In 2005, when only branded prescription statins were available, the researchers estimated that private health insurance companies paid more than $10 billion in 2005.
In the UK, the total government expenditure for statin was estimated to be $17 million in 2005. But since the cost of generic statins continued to lower, the total cost went down to $14 million in 2009 even with the growing number of users.
For Proton Pump Inhibitors – drugs used to reduce gastric production, the total cost was $14 million in the US, as compared to $4 million in the UK.
The cost of prescription drugs is a huge burden to the US economy, suggests Hershel Jick, MD, research author, and director emeritus of the Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program and associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. It greatly impacts the US economy whether the cost is paid by private insurance companies or by the government that offers this service free to military, elderly, government employees, and other sectors.
Jick added that the results of their research were based on reliable, inexpensive and transparent resources. Their findings can be used as basis for considering public and private policy in connection with prescription drugs. “They yield critical insight into the difference in drug costs between the U.S. private sector compared to the U.K. government that can lead to creation of policy that provides greater efficiency and large cost savings".
Source of this article:
The Cost of Prescription Drugs: A Comparison of Two Countries, Boston University School of Medicine
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