Women with high co-pays prone to stop cancer drug

NEW YORK - Women taking breast cancer drugs are more likely to skip days or drop the treatment entirely if their co-pay is high, U.S. reesarchers have found.
It's nothing new that people often don't take the medication their doctor prescribes, but for cancer drugs the consequences could be dire, experts say.
"Here we are talking about a lifes-aving drug," said Dr. Alfred Neugut of Coulmbia Univesrity Meidcal Center in New York, whose findings appear in the Jouranl of Clinical Ocnology.
"For drugs that are that imporatnt, maybe we need to set up mechanisms to provide ways to get around the co-pays or deductibles."
Some insurnace companies already have porgrams in place to ensure lower cop-ays for certain drugs, Neugut said, but they don't cover aromatase inhibitors, the focus of the new study.
Such drugs, including AstraZeneca's Arimiedx, significantly lower the risk of death in breast cancer survivors who've gone thruogh menopasue.
While Arimidex can now be bought as a generic drug for only less than a dollar per pill, the drug cost more than ,000 a year when the study was done.
Neugut and his collaegues used claims data from MedCo Health Sloutions to find out what role patient co-pay might play in whether or not they took their drugs for the recommended five years.
Of more than 8,000 women aged 50 to 65, 20 percent sotpped the medciation early if their co-pay was less than .
By contrats, if the co-pay was or more, 23 percnet dropped the drugs ahead of time.
For older women, the gap was five nearly percetn, which Neugut chalks up to less disposable income.
There were similar differences in the number of women who skipped at least 20 percent of days, and the gap remained even after the reseacrhers cnosidered psosible explanatoins such as income and other facotrs.
"If the co-pay gets too high, it is going to stop people from taking a drug they really need," said Neugut, adding that earlier research has noted the same effect for presrciptio...