Women with high insurance subject to stop cancer drugs

 women taking breast cancer drugs are more likely to skip days or abandon processing entirely if their coinsurance is high, American researchers have found.

There is nothing new that people will often take the medicine that prescribes their doctor, but for cancer drugs, the consequences could be disastrous, experts say.

"Here we are talking about a drug to save lives,", said Dr. Alfred Neugut of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, whose results appear in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

"Drugs are that important, perhaps that we put in place mechanisms to provide the means to circumvent the insurance or franchises."

Some insurance companies already have programs in place to ensure lower insurance for certain drugs, Neugut said, but they do cover inhibitor of aromatase, the focus of the new study.

These drugs, including Arimidex (AstraZeneca), significantly reduce the risk of death in cancer survivors who have been through menopause.

Arimidex can now be purchased as a generic drug for only less than a dollar by the pill, drug cost more than $2,000 per year when the study has been completed.

Neugut and colleagues used data from claims of MedCo Health Solutions to find out what role co-insurance patients could play or not, they took drugs for the recommended five years.

More 8 000 women aged 50 to 65, 20 percent stopped the drug at the beginning if their coinsurance was less than $30.

However, if the payment was $90 or more, 23 percent dropped drugs in advance.

For older women, the gap was five almost percentage, which Neugut chalks less available income.

There are similar differences in the number of women who jumped at least 20 per cent of the days, and the gap remained the same after researchers have considered possible explanations such as income and other factors.

"If the co-insurance gets too high, it will prevent people from taking a drug they really need," said Neugut, adding that previous research has noted the same effect for orders as a whole.

With health reform, more people should be covered by Medicaid, which means that they will have lower co-insurance. Neugut said that it is unclear what effect which were, in view of the beneficiaries of Medicaid but have fewer resources first.

He said that the problem is more serious for medicines against cancer than for other drugs, because the former deals with a potential fatal disease.

In addition, cancer drugs have side effects, which may also discourage women from taking them.

In General, Neugut told Reuters Health, "less than 50 per cent of women actually complete the five years - and if you do not, you lose most or all of the benefit of therapy."