Patients struggle to pay for medicines

McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Dan Reif stocks plenty of low-cost store-brand cold remedies and pain relievers in his pharmacy, not the name brands that his customers can’t afford.

Over the past year he has noticed that a lot more patients have been struggling to pay for their prescriptions.

“More people are out of work, out of insurance,” said Reif, who owns a Medicine Shoppe in Kansas City, Kan. “People come in hoping they’re still covered, and you try to get their insurance to go through. And they say, ’Yeah, I’ve lost my job.’”

Some of his patients try to economize by splitting pills, taking daily medications every other day or just waiting a month to refill prescriptions.

“They wait until they start to see a difference,” Reif said. “It’s not the healthy thing to do, but it’s hard to argue with them.”

What Reif is seeing is becoming all too typical at drugstores across the country, said Jim Owen, director of professional practice of the American Pharmacists Association.

“People are making tough decisions whether to buy food or their medications,” Owen said.

After a decade of steady growth, the number of prescriptions that Americans filled through August of 2008 dropped slightly from the first eight months of the year before, according to the consulting firm IMS Health Inc.

Diann Frye is a new customer at the Medicine Shoppe. Her husband, Gregory, was laid off from his factory job the day after Christmas, and with his job went their health insurance.

Between the two of them, the Fryes take about a dozen prescription drugs. Gregory has been relying on samples from his doctor. Diann has been shopping around for her medications.

Some generics she can get at Wal-Mart for $4. Reif’s store had the cheapest price on pills for her chronic back pain.

“At the bigger drugstores, the price was outrageous,” Frye said.

But Frye was still shopping around for other drugs to treat her high blood pressure and cholesterol.

“Some of them are over $100,” she said.

A lot more customers have been asking Reif for medical advice. When their symptoms are simple and obvious, he might suggest an over-the-counter drug. But many customers want more.

Reif also has been spending more time on the phone with doctors, suggesting lower-cost alternatives to the expensive brand-name drugs they prescribe.

A patient recently came to the drugstore with a prescription for a drug to control nerve pain caused by diabetes. A month’s supply cost more than $105.

“There was no way she would pick it up,” Reif said.

He talked to her doctor, who approved another drug he recommended that came in at $17.

“She went from saying, ‘I can’t afford it’ to ‘I’m coming in to get it,’” Reif said.