Will Healthcare be Rationed or Rational? A Case for Supporting CER
"We ration care in the US today using one of the most capricious and inequitable means possible--ability to pay," says Kim Slocum, former Director, Strategic Planning & Business Development at AstraZe
By on Mar 24, 2009"We ration care in the US today using one of the most capricious and inequitable means possible--ability to pay," says Kim Slocum, former Director, Strategic Planning & Business Development at AstraZeneca. "As cost shifting to consumers has accelerated over the past decade, weve seen the effects of this as year-on-year sales growth for prescription products has dropped on more or less a straight line since 2000."
Unless something changes, Slocum envisions dire consequences for the drug industry: "Extend the trend out just a bit further and youre faced with a world in which sixty or seventy million people are completely uninsured with many of the remainder living with very skimpy coverage. Generic utilization rates in this situation probably exceed 80% and perhaps 30%-40% of all prescriptions go unfilled." This describes a future scenario Slocum calls "Consumer Chaos."
In an article to be published in the March 2009 issue of Pharma Marketing News, Slocum describes several alternative scenarios and makes a case for the industry to support Comparative Effectiveness Research or CER.