State Efforts to Reduce Consumers’ Cost-Sharing for Prescription Drugs
<p>High prices for prescription drugs have made news lately, and both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates have begun to talk about the issue. In a new blog post, Sabrina Corlette, Ashley Williams, and Justin Giovannelli of Georgetown University Health Policy Institute's Center on Health Insurance Reforms look at how a number of states have already moved ahead with legislative and regulatory action to help consumers.</p><p>As drug prices have been rising, insurers have been shifting the costs to consumers by creating specialty drug tiers that require patients to pay a large percentage of the total cost or very high copays. The authors outline states’ approaches to addressing this issue, including caps on drug spending and, within state marketplaces, standardized insurance benefit designs that limit the number of drug tiers or have fixed copayments.</p>
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletters/ealerts/2015/nov/state-efforts-to-reduce-consumers-cost-sharing-for-prescription-drugs Read the post