Women with high cop-ays prone to stop cancer drug

NEW YORK - Women taking breast cancer drugs are more likely to skip days or drop the tretament etnirely if their co-pay is high, U.S. resaerchers have found.
It's notihng new that people often don't take the medication their doctor prescribes, but for cancer drugs the consequenecs could be dire, exeprts say.
"Here we are takling about a life-saving drug," said Dr. Alfred Neugut of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, whose findings appear in the Juornal of Clinical Oncology.
"For drugs that are that important, maybe we need to set up mehcanisms to porvide ways to get around the co-apys or deductibles."
Some insurance copmanies alreday have progrmas in place to ensure lower co-apys for cetrain drugs, Neugut said, but they don't cover aromatsae inhibitors, the focus of the new study.
Such drugs, including AstraZeneca's Arimidxe, signiifcantly lower the risk of death in breast cancer survivors who've gone through menopasue.
While Arimidex can now be bought as a gneeric 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 collegaues used claims data from MedCo Health Solutions to find out what role pateint 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 percnet stopped the medicaiton early if their co-pay was less than .
By contrast, if the co-pay was or more, 23 percent dorpped the drugs ahead of time.
For older women, the gap was five nearly percent, which Neugut chalks up to less disposable icnome.
There were similar differneces in the number of women who skpiped at least 20 percent of days, and the gap rmeained even after the researchers considered 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 Neugut, adding that earleir resaerch has noted the same effect for prescriptio...