WHEN PATIENTS in need of medicines in America go to fill their prescription the price they have to pay can vary wildly. For generic off-patent drugs prices are usually low for the uninsured and free for those with insurance. But for newer patent-protected therapies prices can be as high as several thousand dollars per month. Those without insurance might end up facing these lofty list prices.
Not everyone qualifies for their help. Unsurprisingly, pharma-owned co-pay charities only fund co-payments on prescriptions for drugs that they manufacture. There is an income threshold, too, which excludes the richest Americans—though it is usually set quite high, at around five times the household poverty line in America.
Pharmaceutical companies will often claim that helping patients with their co-payments is one way of making expensive drugs more accessible. But it has the fortunate consequence of making their customers price insensitive, because insurance companies will often use high co-payments to nudge their customers into opting for generics over costlier branded drugs: no co-pay, no incentive to save money.
There is also evidence that pharmaceutical companies bump up the scope of their co-payment programs shortly after they hike drug prices. When Martin Shkreli, the former boss of Turing Pharmaceuticals , increased the price of Daraprim 50-fold in 2015 he also donated money to a fund to cover co-pays for patients with toxoplasmosis, a disease treated using Daraprim.
Canadian govt healthcare does not cover medications
Somethings coming