Oct 24
Free Drugs Save Insurance Companies Money: The Power of Statistics
In a startling display of peremptory Ivy League hypotheses cleverly disguised as research, a Harvard University Medical School report suggests that free preventative heart medication would save health insurance companies money in the long run.
This ‘new study’ suggests insurers would be greatly rewarded financially if they removed the cost-sharing requirements imposed for certain medications taken by customers who had previously suffered a heart attack.
A combination of heart medications and cholesterol-lowering drugs has been estimated to reduce the risk of death from heart disease by 80 percent compared with a placebo. Yet, the medications continue to be greatly underused. One answer to that problem would be to provide full coverage of the heart medicines to those who had a previous heart attack, instead of requiring the patient to pick up a share of those costs.
Often the extra coverage could be entirely offset by the savings generated when health problems are averted, said researchers at Harvard Medical School. Under conservative assumptions, compliance with a medication regimen would increase from 50 percent to 63 percent among patients when they bear none of the cost for the medicine. The study estimates the additional coverage would cost insurers an average of $550 per patient, but that would lead to fewer deaths and nonfatal heart attacks and strokes, saving $1,731 in costs per heart-related event.
“If insurers can both boost compliance rates and prevent secondary heart disease events by shouldering these out-of-pocket costs, it’s worth the investment,” said an assistant professor at Harvard.
It is worthy of note that these medications reduce risk from heart disease but nowhere is it claimed that they actually avert health problems. They delay secondary heart disease events perhaps, but they do not cure heart disease.
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