While pharmaceutical manufacturers say these ads are simply providing potential patients valuable medical information, insurance companies and some doctors believe the ads are creating an inappropriate demand for new, costlier and often unnecessary drugs. In the report, released today by the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, a health care policy group based in Washington. The fear here is whether this is driving people to get more expensive medicines they may not really need. In that time, the report found, more consumers were visiting their doctors to ask for the marketed drugs and more prescriptions had been written for them. The findings are not surprising to some experts, seeing the increased sales as proof that advertising works.
Drugs ought to be pretty much the same.
Advertising costs may also be spurring an increase in drug prices, which then gets passed along to consumers and insurers. The price of a prescription rose 10 percent in 1999, the report says, partially because of the use of expensive new drugs, but also because of a rise in the price of drugs itself. The group has already called for stricter television ads, and will lobby doctors and Congress on whether cheaper drugs may be equally as effective. To cut cost, some managed care organizations remove heavily-marketed drugs from their formularies. Jim Carlson, assistant director of pharmacy administration at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle, Washington, says his group has specifically chosen to only cover medications that spend less on ads, such as Allegra rather than Claritin.