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Article Excerpt
For the past six years, prescription benefit management consultancy Arxcel has commissioned independent research to track the trends and issues surrounding prescription benefit programs as perceived by employers.
The Arxcel Prescription Benefit Research Survey Series is distributed to benefit managers and other executives to help businesses and plan sponsors better manage their health benefits programs and inform them of actions they can take to impact the programs' utilization and cost per member in this new year.
Our annual survey tracks the trends from within the pharmaceutical industry, which become benchmarks for the year ahead. In addition to this, the 2007 survey explored a new area: The perceptions surrounding pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs).
High Prescription Benefit Costs: Who's to Blame?
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising again is seen as the most significant cause of rising prescription costs by respondents of this year's survey: Advertising ranked as the top contributor for the sixth year running. It is no surprise really. Many pharmaceutical ads litter our radios, televisions, magazines, newspaper, and doctor's offices.
The percentage identifying DTC as the trend most responsible for escalating costs had been on the decline for the past several years: In this year's survey the percentage of respondents citing DTC is 45.5 percent, up nearly 10 percent from the 2006 survey's total of 36 percent.
The trend has always been to blame DTC advertising as the number one factor in rising drug costs, with research and development (R&D) coming in a close second with 24.6 percent of the blame.
While pharmaceutical companies may not be scrutinized as harshly for DTC advertising as they were in the past, it is still clear that employers blame drug companies for the cost increases. Finding ways to counteract...
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