Medication Moments in Family Practice

Yes, that her "out" during
freshman orientation.

My younger daughter has a condition known as narcolepsy (she OK'd this post by the way). Because of it, she has a tendency to fall asleep any where and any time, but it is worse in the mid-afternoon. During college she was prescribed a medication called Provigil, which improved her ability to function in the real world, particularly in afternoon classes. Her classmates were a little disappointed at how well the medication worked as they could no longer tease her with drooling photographs taken during lectures. Due to the cost of the medication, she quit taking it while doing her present research job in Panama. Recently, she realized that her tendency to fall asleep in the middle of writing was interfering with her ability to finish her research paper. I'd heard that Provigil was now generic so I looked to see how much that would cost us, expecting some improvement in price. Nope it is still $26/pill if you pay without insurance (that is NOT a typo, with a prescription but no insurance coverage, thirty days of the drug will cost in excess of $788). WITH our Humana insurance, it would be a little more than $100/month, IF we could get a Prior Authorization on it. She bought it in Panama for $2 a pill. She did not need a prescription. I suggested that she stock up while she's down there. Maybe she can get enough to last through graduate school.

Following that personal medication moment, I received a fax from RightSource, the prescription company owned by Humana. They wanted to know if a patient of mine who is taking a blood pressure drug called Bystolic was using insulin. Insulin, as you probably know, is a hormone important in diabetes and can be given in injectable form to diabetics. Bystolic is a type of blood pressure drug that can mask the symptoms of a low blood sugar in diabetics. The weird thing is, this patient is not a diabetic. Humana has yet to answer my request as to why they were asking me the question.

Vagifem

On Friday a patient came to me who is post-menopausal and having some vaginal dryness which is making intercourse uncomfortable. I suggested using a topical estrogen, specifically a drug named Vagifem. Many women prefer this form of topical because it is in a small pill that is much less messy than creams. Now here is where it gets weird. First of all, I could not tell the patient how much this prescription would cost her in the pharmacy because it is a "third tier" listed drug with Humana. She can look it up on line on the MyHumana site but I have no way of knowing. I do know it costs about $68/month if you don't use insurance to buy it. There are no "generic" estrogen creams BUT Humana lists Premarin estrogen cream as second tier which typically is a $30-40 monthly copay. Here's the kicker--if you buy Premarin cream without insurance it will cost you $150/tube (a tube will last anywhere from two to four months).

My medication frustrations this week were multi-fold--why do drugs cost so much more in the US than other countries (here's a link to an interesting article in the New York Times that is old but still rings true regarding this question); why do I have to spend my time answering ludicrous questions for drug coverage companies in order to get my patients' drugs refilled; and why isn't there more transparency in medication costs for me and my patients?