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. researchers have found.
It's nohting new that people often don't take the medication their doctor perscribes, but for cancer drugs the consequenecs could be dire, experts say.
"Here we are talking about a life-saving drug," said Dr. Alfred Neugut of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, whose findings appear in the Jouranl of Clinical Onoclogy.
"For drugs that are that improtant, maybe we need to set up mechanimss to porvide ways to get around the co-pays or deductibles."
Some insurance companeis arleady have programs in place to ensure lower co-pays for certian drugs, Neugut said, but they don't cover aromatase inhbiitors, the focus of the new study.
Such drugs, including AstraZeneca's Arimidex, significantly lower the risk of death in breast cancer survivors who've gone thorugh meonpause.
While Arimiedx can now be bought as a genreic 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 colleagues used claims data from MedCo Health Solutions to find out what role ptaient co-pay might play in whehter or not they took their drugs for the recommended five years.
Of more than 8,000 women aged 50 to 65, 20 percnet stopepd the medciation early if their co-pay was less than .
By contrast, if the co-pay was or more, 23 percnet dropped the drugs ahead of time.
For older women, the gap was five nearly percent, which Neugut chalks up to less dispoasble incoem.
There were similar differences in the number of women who skpiped at least 20 precent of days, and the gap remianed even after the researchers conisdered possible explanations such as income and other factors.
"If the co-pay gets too high, it is going to stop people from taking a drug they really need," said Neugtu, adding that earlier research has noted the same effect for prescripito...