Health Insurance Plan Market Share
Why Prescription Drug Marketing Leads to Expensive Health Insurance Plans
There are many factors that affect the price of health insurance plans. Increasing medical costs play a major role in that. One of the primary drivers of those costs are prescription drugs. As medications are developed and improved for more conditions, patients and doctors can benefit. However, pharmaceutical companies are earning billions of dollars in profit each year at the expense of access to cost-effective health insurance plans.
The United States is one of two countries in the world (the other is New Zealand) which allows direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. Medications are marketed like any other products on TV, in magazines, and online. Their advertising campaigns are based on branding and other marketing tactics in addition to salient factors like effectiveness. The drugs’ benefits are trumpeted loudly, while disclaimers in small print mention the inevitable side effects. Such advertisements increase consumer demand for those products, just as they do for cars, phones, and lipstick. Marketers use tactics that incorporate behavioral psychology knowledge to sell their products, which may not lead to the best health care.
Medical advertising causes the cost of health insurance plans to rise in several ways. First, patients must visit their primary care physician in order to receive a prescription. In many cases, the drug that was advertised is unsuitable to their health status, or unnecessary altogether. In recent years, there have been some ads for brand-name prescription drugs that gave absolutely no details about the product whatsoever! This is because laws require that advertisers mention the drawbacks of a prescription if they mention its benefits. Therefore, many people were shelling out co-payments and seeing their doctor to ask about a drug like Nexium, whose initial advertising campaign vaguely referred to the “purple pill”. If a person didn’t have the unrevealed condition it was for, the drug was irrelevant to them. Therefore, their health insurance plans wasted time and money because they were unaware that it actually treated acid reflux-caused heartburn.
In addition, there are many generic prescription drugs that share the same ingredients as their name brand counterparts. Many doctors and health insurance plans steer their patients towards such equally effective formulas, which save all parties money. Still, studies have shown that physicians are more likely to prescribe the name brand when it is specifically demanded by the consumer. The major pharmaceutical companies make regular modifications to their products in order to retain their patents, as their older drugs patents’ expire. Most of these changes are relatively minor, such as creating a gel-cap instead of a tablet, for example. Similar to other industries, it is difficult to convince some consumers to take the lower-priced generic or store brand when the well known brand is spending millions to promote its “all new” improvements.
This same misguided motive for customer satisfaction is even more prevalent when a patient is armed with a voucher or discount coupon for the name brand. Over half of the best-selling name brand drugs in the U.S. have such offers available on their websites. Free samples make the brand name appear cheaper at first, in addition to making doctors and patients more likely to select a prescription that isn’t ideal for the patient. Eventually, health insurance plans end up paying more after the discount than they would if the less expensive generic medication had been chosen. They pass the cost onto policyholders by increasing health insurance premiums or co-payment amounts. Strengthening regulation of direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising could be a viable provision for healthcare reform, since doing so has the potential to reduce wasteful spending.
About the Author
Yamileth Medina is an up and coming expert on Health Insurance and Healthcare Reform. She aims to help people realize that they can find quality health insurance plans right now while waiting for a public option, if it ever gets passed. Yamileth lives in Miami, FL.
South Africa National Health Insurance Plan
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