Even as the cost of prescription drugs has plummeted for many Americans, a small slice of the population is being asked to shoulder more and more of the cost of expensive treatments for diseases like cancer and hepatitis C, according to a report to be released on Tuesday by a major drug research firm.
The findings echo the conclusions of two other reports released last week by major pharmacy benefit managers, which predicted that spending on so-called specialty drugs would continue to rise.
The report, by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, also found that consumers’ use of health care — visits to the doctor, hospital admissions and prescription drug use — rose in 2013 for the first time in three years, mainly because of the improving economy, it said.
“Following several years of decline, 2013 was striking for the increased use by patients of all parts of the U.S. health care system,” Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute, said in a statement. He noted that the spike came before the Affordable Care Act, which has helped provide health insurance to millions of new customers, fully went into effect.
But even as consumers became more confident about spending money on health care last year, the report found that a divide is developing between those with medical conditions that can be treated with cheap generic drugs, and those with rare and often more serious diseases that can come with breathtaking price tags.
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GM CEO Mary Barra testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee as Congress tries to fix blame for long delays in recalling cars with defective ignition switches linked to at least 13 crash deaths. Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.
Protecting consumers from dangerous product defects should be the job of federal regulation, and often it is. But sometimes product injury litigation, carried out in the arena of the courtroom, plays a critical role in exposing hazards that elude regulators and that manufacturers conceal.
Two current, highly publicized examples are the General Motors ignition switch malfunction and the Toyota “sudden unintended acceleration” hazard, both serious defects that regulators failed to move against as promptly and vigorously as they should have.
Earlier this year GM recalled more than two million Cobalts and other vehicles with the defective ignition switches. If jarred, the switches can inadvertently shut down a car’s engine and electrical system, thus disabling its air bags, power brakes and power steering. Only now has the company admitted knowing about the defect for more than ten years, even though it was being sued as early as 2009 for crash deaths caused by the faulty switch.
It turns out that the defect was not exposed by engineers from GM or the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration but by an outside engineer. Mark Hood was working for a plaintiff’s attorney in Melton v. GM, a Georgia lawsuit...