News Flash:

Over One million US adults can't afford their drugs

New survey findings show approximately 1.3 million adults with disabilities in the US cannot afford to take medications in the manner prescribed by their doctors,

Lead author Dr. Jae Kennedy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said , those who don't take medications as they are supposed to are likely experiencing health consequences.  Indeed, the survey showed that more than half of the people who said they don't always follow their doctors' orders on medication have at least one health problem--such as pain and discomfort--as a result.

"Prescription drug coverage is unavailable or inadequate for a large number of adults with disabilities," Kennedy said. "We have to reduce drug costs for consumers, particularly heavy users of prescription drugs."

Kennedy and his co-author, Christopher Erb, base their findings on a survey of 25,805 disabled adults about their use of prescription drugs. The investigators then multiplied the percentage of certain behaviors within this sample by the number of disabled adults in the US to estimate the total number of people behaving similarly.

Reporting in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, journal of the American Public Health Association, Kennedy and Erb found that 70% of US disabled adults--a total of 28 million people--say they have received at least one prescription. However, almost 4 million of them also report that they do not always take the drugs in the way their doctors have prescribed.

Of those who don't always follow their doctors' orders, 1.3 million say they do so because of the cost associated with the drugs. Some reported not filling the prescription, while others either did not refill the prescription or did not fill it completely, or took the medicine less often because of how much it cost.

Uninsured adults were four times as likely as those who had private insurance to not take their medicines as directed, and younger disabled adults were 10 times less likely than their older peers to follow prescriptions properly.

Kennedy said that the disabled population is unlikely to be helped by the efforts of Congress to extend drug benefits to those who receive Medicare, for only 27% of the disabled population surveyed in this study receives Medicare.

As such, the cost of drugs must simply come down, the researcher noted, perhaps through cost controls or the expansion of insurance coverage to include those who might be otherwise ineligible.

"Most current policy initiatives favor expanding insurance benefits, but we also need to increase insurance eligibility for adults with disabilities," he said.

Kennedy and Erb write that even more disabled adults may not be taking the drugs they need than this survey estimates, given that many studies have found respondents tend to overestimate how often they take their drugs as directed.

Furthermore, the study does not determine how many people take their drugs "at great personal cost," the authors write, meaning they forgo food or other needed expenses to get their medication.

SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health 2002;92:1120-1124.

For information on how you can have your patients get the drugs they need, go to www.diabetesmeds.org