Have you had the experience where you need a medication, and the brand name actually is cheaper for you because your doctor gives you a coupon for it? It’s great for you, but it’s bad for the healthcare system, and here’s why.
I have written before about the principle that is relevant to this, but it bears repeating: The party making a purchase decision must be the one who also bears the price differential between those options.
To understand why, let’s pretend you have a medium risk of heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years, so your doctor recommends you start a moderate-intensity statin medication. They’re all pretty close to equal in terms of efficacy and side effects, so the best money-saving decision would be to choose the cheapest one, right? Well, if your doctor says, “I’m happy to prescribe any of these for you. Which would you like?” You are the party who now gets to make a purchase decision. So you look at the monthly prices below (these are real prices):
But then your doctor hands you a pitavastatin $100 off coupon some drug rep from Kowa Pharmaceuticals (the manufacturer) dropped off. You, a rational person, opt for that one since it’s now the cheapest (free)!
Now the monthly cost to the healthcare system for you to be on a statin totals $0.00 (your copay) + $101.36 (what your insurer has to cover) = $101.36. That’s about 20 times more expensive than it should have been!
What just happened here? The party making the purchase decision (you) did not bear the price differential between the options. Your insurer originally set it up so that you would pay more if you chose a more expensive statin, but the coupon interfered with that.
This same situation plays out over and over every day in our healthcare system with medications and with every other health service. It’s why I keep saying that we need to make the party who makes the purchase decision the same party who bears at least some part of the price differential between the options, which leads to a value-sensitive decision. Reference pricing does it, high-deductible insurance plans do it (for services below the deductible, at least), multi-tier prescription programs do it (when they’re not being subverted by manufacturer coupons). But these, collectively, are not influencing nearly enough of the purchase decisions being made in our healthcare system! And we waste money. Even worse, the higher value options are not rewarded with market share, the lower-value options are allowed to persist as is, and the overall value delivered by our healthcare system remains much lower than it could be.
So that’s why medication coupons–and any other thing that interferes with purchasers bearing the price differential between options–are bad.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 