We have experienced an impressive slowdown in the growth of healthcare expenditures in recent years, a slowdown attributed in part to the plethora of important drugs which have gone generic in recent years. But state Medicaid programs, according to a recent study in Health Affairs, could have slowed healthcare costs even more, if they had been quicker to switch patients from trade to generic pills.
The study, by Christina Kelton and colleagues, looked at how quickly states adopted generic fluoxetine (better known as: Prozac). This drug went generic in 2001, by which time state Medicaid programs were spending (gulp!) over $400 million dollars per year on it. With the switch to generic, that meant a nice bit of savings for these cash starved programs.
And yet . . .
According to Kelton, it took most states between six months and three years before they had switched most of their Medicaid patients (greater than 90% of them) to the generic pill. In the four and a half years following the availability of generic Prozac, states missed out on $220 million dollars of potential savings. Kelton and colleagues even provide a picture of which states left the largest amount of money on the table… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)
