Drug Ads Could Cost Taxpayers

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook for high-dollar drug advertising that does little to boost sales.
 
A joint Harvard – University of British Columbia (UBC) study examined U.S. sales patterns of clopidogrel, a top-selling drug with the trade name Plavix, which is used to prevent blood clots after heart attack or stroke. Plavix was selected to study the impact of advertising on sales, because it was sold for more than three years before the launch of its first direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) campaign in 2001.

"While clopidogrel use has been increasing for some time, we found advertising it to consumers didn't make use rise any faster," Assistant Professor Michael Law of the UBC Centre for Health Services and Policy Research, who conducted the study with colleagues from Harvard Medical School, the University of Alberta and Kaiser Permanente while he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, was quoted as saying.

A significant jump in the drug's price coincided with the launch of its DTCA campaign. This higher price added $207 million to the pharmacy bill for Medicaid, the publicly funded U.S. health program for low-income patients.

"Pharmaceutical companies need to recuperate the costs of the advertising through either increased sales or higher prices," said Law. "The timing of this price increase raises important questions about whether it was related to the $350 million spent advertising clopidogrel through 2005."

Co-author Stephen Soumerai, professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, was quoted as saying, "The key issue is whether advertising to consumers, which has risen 330 percent in the last 10 years in the U.S., contributes to the significant cost increases in publicly funded health insurance programs such as Medicaid."

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, November 23, 2009

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