Health insurance co-payments may disappear

BOSTON, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- Reducing cost sharing -- such as co-payments on prescription drugs -- increases the number of people complying with doctor's orders, U.S. researchers say.

Niteesh Choudhry of the Harvard Medical School examined efforts by Pitney Bowes, which is self-insured, to get employees to stay on certain high-value medications. If more people adopt a healthier lifestyle and more follow doctor's orders, its healthcare costs are reduced.

When the corporation eliminated co-payments for cholesterol-lowering statins, employee adherence to the drugs increased 2.8 percent and when it reduced co-payments for the blood clot inhibitor clopidogrel, adherence rose 4 percent, the study finds.

In a second study, Matthew Maciejewski of the Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care at the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and colleagues say Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina's efforts to eliminate or reduce co-payments for medications produced similar results.

Adherence to prescriptions for those with diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia and congestive heart failure increased from 1.5 percent to 3.8 percent when patients paid less than employees who weren't offered the cheaper option.

"If these promising early results are validated in other settings, the trend of rising co-payments may be replaced with a long-term trend of decreasing or vanishing co-payments," Maciejewski says.

The findings are published in the journal Health Affairs.