The signs of skin aging can be reversed with prescription medication. A new weight loss drug which works by preventing the absorption of calories rather than suppressing the appetite is also available. Studies suggest that treatment with human growth hormone may help children with genetic short stature add extra inches to their height. The list goes on and on. The point I am making is that pharmaceutical companies have come out with a wide array of new medications that really work for some of the most common diseases that plague us.
Many older treatments are now obsolete.
However, these new therapies are all under patent, which means that they are available only in the more expensive brand name form. It was inevitable that HMOs would target drugs as a site of possible cost savings. The first way they did this was to arrange contracts with certain pharmacies which would agree to reduce their prices in exchange for the promise of high volume sales. This resulted in certain national pharmacy chains becoming so congested that nonHMO patients were driven elsewhere, and I have seen for myself the extra work and aggravation HMO policies have caused pharmacists. When exclusive contracts did not save enough money, manage care plans came up with a new strategy.