I’ve always found it curious that we spend so much research and clinical time and money on drug treatment, debating which antihypertensive is best, or which chemo combination cures the most people, but quickly gloss over the requirements to get a pill in a patient’s mouth. To take one extreme, consider the following thought experiment: say a researcher develops a cure for cancer and HIV (yes, at the same time!) but that each pill costs $5 million. While the theoretical efficacy of the drug may be 100% at providing a cure, its practical efficacy is near 0%: without money (or more generally, access) for this pill, it cures no one.

Study after study after study has shown that a lot of people skip their medications, and in the US, this is often due to cost. You take someone and say, “Hey, here’s $100, do you want food for the month or medications,” and funny enough, they choose food. Certainly there are other reasons that people do not take their medications–and these affect people in all countries–but patients in the US are much more likely to cite cost as the main reason they do not take their medications.

A few reasons this doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense:

1. We pony up and pay for the acute consequences of poorly controlled chronic diseases already. Let’s take my oft-picked-on disease, diabetes. If someone needs a foot amputation, or they need dialysis because their kidneys have shut down, we pay for it. So we wait until they’re super sick and then require a huge investment in resources, but before that, they’re simply out of luck. How is that a good financial investment? How does that minimize costs in our business-run health care world?
2. We pony up for acute care which we know saves lives, but not the chronic follow-up care which we know saves lives. If someone has a big heart attack, we throw an insane amount of resources toward that patient: emergency room staff, we often call in a team of cardiologists to go open up a clogged artery, and operate expensive machinery in the process, because we know it may save his or her life. But we take that same patient at discharge, when we have similar data saying that a drug like a beta blocker may save his or her life after having a heart attack and don’t provide the same resources to the patient, even though the beta blocker is a much cheaper intervention.

Yes yes, acute issues are by definition more immediate and often more life threatening, but if we’re providing resources, shouldn’t we provide them on some logical, rational basis or principle?

I’ll touch more on this in some of my concluding posts (which are coming up) but at the very least we should be providing better medication access to patients who have known indications for said drugs. I’ve seen uninsured patients with urinary tract infections who can’t afford their antibiotics and have simply returned to the ED with pyelonephritis (a kidney infection due to an untreated bladder infection) and require IV antibiotics and a hospital stay. It makes no sense for any player in our health care system: the patient, the nurse, the doctor, or even the health insurers, who’re getting billed more from hospitals because the hospitals have to care for the uninsured. We should all be angry, frustrated, and annoyed at yet another example of our health care non-system which, at the end of the day, costs us all more in time and money.

I applaud Wal-Mart, Target, et. al for making a huge list of their generics $4. It certainly makes things much more affordable for many people.

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