Middle class popping a lot of painkillers

22 July 2015 - 02:03 By Katharine Child

Medical aid schemes are coughing up most for chronic medicines, cancer treatment and painkillers. The latest annual report of Mediscor, which helps medical aids manage spending on medication, offers a snapshot of middle-class drug use, showing the habits of about a million of 8million members of schemes.According to the report, 17% of the million members use medicines for high blood pressure, accounting for 10% of all medicine spending.Cancer treatment, including oncology drugs and medicines for side-effects and pain, account for up almost 9.5% of the spending, for just 0 .8% of the million members.This indicated the very high costs of treating the disease, said Madelein Bester, a pharmacist who helped compile the report.The second-most commonly used drugs were combination painkillers, used by almost half of the million members last year.The high use of combination painkillers, which often include codeine, could be a problem as codeine is addictive.But Lorraine Osmon of the Pharmacy Society of SA said it was hard to say that codeine use was a problem: "This conclusion cannot be drawn on the quoted figure alone, because there are combination analgesics that do not contain codeine."Osmon said it would be important to have the diagnostic code, which would tell you exactly why the patient was using the painkiller. But "the high use certainly raises a red flag and requires further investigation".Bester said the abuse of codeine was most likely paid for with cash because medical aids monitored the use of such drugs and had limits on what could be claimed. Members usually used painkillers only a few times a year, she said.The number of claims for speciality medicines, often used for cancer, increased by 10.5% on the previous year, according to the Mediscor report. The cost per patient also increased.Increased use of generic medicines was one way to cut drug expenditure, said Mediscor.But though purchases of generics reached an "all-time high", 18% of the total drug expenditure was on original medicines whose patent had expired and for which a generic was available."Originals with expired patents were, on average, 34% more expensive than generic equivalents, while originals with valid patents were 133% more expensive" said Bester.Patients often chose over-the-counter originals rather than the generic because of brand awareness, according to the report.The CEO of the Independent Community Pharmacy Association, Mark Payne, said some doctors did not believe all generics were effective and wrote "non-substitutable" on scripts...

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