Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

Soon, Congress may vote on whether to require the Medicare system to negotiate lower prices for medicines taken by millions of seniors enrolled in Medicare Part D prescription drug plans.

That change and others might save some seniors a lot of money, suggests a new study from the University of Michigan Medical School.

It finds tremendous variation in what Medicare enrollees in different states pay for the same medications, even with the lowest-cost Part D plans.

In fact, two people taking the same drugs but living in different states could face costs that differed by thousands of dollars -- even if each had chosen the lowest-cost plan available to them.

Such wide variation in prices means that Medicare prescription drug plans are substantially more affordable in some states than in others, the authors conclude.

In all, depending on which medicines they're taking and which plan they're in, people in one state might spend 10 percent of their annual income to pay for prescription drug coverage premiums and co-pays, while someone taking the same medicines in another state would spend 20 percent of their income, the study finds.

"The expected costs of even the least-expensive plans in each state varied by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars," says Davis, an associate professor of general internal medicine and pediatrics at the U-M Medical School, and associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

It's the first study to look at variation in Part D costs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and is the first to use actual patient scenarios to examine prices across states for the same drugs.

One bright spot in the study came when the authors examined a scenario under which a diabetic patient who did not need insulin to control his blood sugar levels at the start of the year suddenly needed insulin added to his drug regimen.

Because Part D participants can only switch plans at the end of the calendar year, an unanticipated addition to their medications can result in unexpectedly high out-of-pocket costs.

"The people who can least afford to pay higher prices were the ones facing those higher prices," Davis comments.

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