BALTIMORE, July 22 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers Thursday said Medicare could eliminate a coverage gap in its drug benefit if it paid the same prices for drugs as other countries.
The report from Johns Hopkins and Pennsylvania State universities found the amount paid for drugs in Canada, the United Kingdom and France is a reasonable benchmark for pharmaceutical prices in the United States. It said that level of spending would allow the senior health insurance program to provide drug benefits to seniors, beginning in 2006, without a coverage gap, during which seniors pay for all of their prescriptions, while still keeping spending at the same level.
The 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act's coverage gap comes between $2,250 and $5,100 in drug spending annually. This "doughnut hole" was crafted by lawmakers to keep the entire Medicare bill below $400 billion over its 10-year period.
"The trade-off could be that fewer new drugs would be introduced into the market because drug companies wouldn't be able to afford as much biomedical research," Johns Hopkins Professor Gerard Anderson said in a statement.
