WASHINGTON -- Buttressing Bush administration claims, the new Medicare discount drug cards offer savings off retail prescription prices, an independent analysis released Wednesday said.
But a bewildering array of choices among more than five dozen drug cards is causing confusion among older and disabled Americans and limiting enrollment in the two-month-old program, said the study prepared for the nonpartisan, not-for-profit Kaiser Family Foundation.
More than four million people, including nearly a million who receive an annual low-income subsidy of $600, have drug cards, although most were automatically enrolled by their HMOs or state pharmacy assistance program. The card is temporary, to be replaced in 2006 with prescription drug insurance under Medicare.
The administration has said Medicare beneficiaries with no drug insurance would save an average of 25 percent off their drug bills because the privately marketed cards would use bulk purchasing power to negotiate discounts.
The analysis said the best prices for 10 popular medicines, including cholesterol-reducing Lipitor, Fosamax for osteoporosis and the painkiller Celebrex, were nearly a quarter less than the retail price when purchased at a pharmacy. Using mail-order services, the drug cards were up to a third cheaper than the retail pharmacy prices.
The study looked at seven discount cards and retail prices in Baltimore, according to Health Policy Alternatives, the consulting firm that did the analysis.
"All of the cards had prices that were significantly less," said Julia James, one of three authors of the report.
However, the study also found that the Internet pharmacy drugstore.com advertised prices that were competitive with the discount cards. Prescription drugs also remain substantially cheaper in Canada and through the Department of Veterans Affairs, which negotiates directly with drug makers. Those comparisons were not part of the Kaiser report.
Medicare chief Mark McClellan, who took part in Kaiser's press briefing on the study, said, "We're working to make progress lowering beneficiaries' drug prices and drug costs right now."
Medicare soon will take steps to make enrollment easier by allowing people to sign up electronically, replacing a more cumbersome process that requires a signature on paper, McClellan said.
One question unanswered by the report is how the Medicare-approved cards compare to prescription discount cards that seniors were using before last year's Medicare overhaul created a new discount program. A Harvard doctoral study by Juliette Cubanski that was published in April by the journal Health Affairs showed that those cards already were yielding average savings of more than 17 percent off retail prices.
On the Net:
Kaiser Family Foundation: http://www.kff.org
Medicare: http://www.medicare.gov
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