Notice the statement highlighted in red. What the means, of course, is that the changes created by the deficit reduction act do not address the actual problem. Shifting costs is not lowering costs.

Drug Prices Are Damn High

The cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. consistently eclipses prices in other countries. They are a staggering average 156% higher in fact.

Drug companies argue domestic costs are higher because the U.S. drives medical innovation and we subsidize care in other countries. They say, given the substantial challenges of drug development, including high rates of trial failures and lengthy research timelines, recouping research investments is crucial if we want future breakthroughs. We should make other countries pay first before doing anything else here, they argue.

While that may be true, it is also true that current prices are too damn high for most Americans to get the care they need.

Consider these statistics:

• 66% of American adults rely on prescription medications.
• 40% of Americans say they struggle to pay for medications.
• 90% of Americans say their drug costs are higher or the same as the year before.
• Many Americans skip doses or cut pills in half to make their prescriptions last longer.
• The top five drug companies last year made more than $80 billion in profit.

Medpagetoday.com

Study: One-fifth of recent FDA approved drugs not authorized, reimbursed in other countries

Regulatory News | 13 February 2023 | Jeff Craven

More than one-fifth of drugs recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were not approved or recommended for public reimbursement in other countries, according to a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“This cross-sectional study demonstrated that more than one-fifth of the new drugs approved by the FDA in 2017 through 2020 were either refused marketing authorization or not recommended for reimbursement in Australia, Canada, or the UK as of May 2022 due to unfavorable benefit-to-risk profiles, uncertain clinical benefit, or unacceptably high price,” Catherine Pham, PharmD, MPH, of the Pharmacy Outcomes Research Group at Kaiser Permanente National Pharmacy in Downey, CA, and colleagues wrote in their study.

Source: https://www.raps.org/News-and-Articles/News-Articles/2023/2/Study-One-fifth-of-recent-FDA-approved-drugs-not-a#

Prescription drug statistics worldwide

• More than 26% of UK adults take prescription medications (Public Health England, 2020).
• About 35% of Australians take prescription medicine every day (Health Direct, 2018).
• In Canada, about 65% of people aged 40-79 take one or more prescription drugs (CDC, 2019).
• 35 million people around the world have drug use disorders (United Nations, 2019).
• Pain medications are the most commonly abused prescription drugs (Mississippi State Department of Health, 2021). 
• Only 1 in 7 people receive treatment for drug use disorders around the world (United Nations, 2019). 
• The global number of opioid users is estimated to be 53 million (United Nations, 2019).

Prescription drug statistics in the United States

• There are more than 20,000 prescription drugs that are approved for marketing (FDA, 2020).
• About 66% of U.S. adults take prescription drugs (Health Policy Institute, 2021).
• About 46% of U.S. adults have taken a prescription drug in the past 30 days (CDC, 2019).
• The therapeutic areas with the highest spending in the U.S. are antidiabetics, oncologics, autoimmune, and respiratory diseases (Statista, 2021).
• The leading drug classes in the U.S. are antihypertensives, pain relievers, and mental health drugs (Statista, 2021). 
• The most commonly abused types of prescription drugs in the U.S. are opioids, tranquilizers, benzodiazepines, and prescription stimulants (Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 2014).
• The U.S. consumed about 30% of the world’s supply of opioids in 2015 (Politifact, 2017).
• Almost 50,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2019 (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2019).

Prescription drug statistics by age group

Prescription drug use tends to increase with age. According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of 2015-2016:

• 18% of children aged 0-11 years old reportedly used prescription drugs in the past 30 days
• 27% of adolescents aged 12-19 years old reportedly used prescription drugs in the past 30 days
• 47% of adults aged 20-59 years old reportedly used prescription drugs in the past 30 days
• 85% of adults aged 60 or older reportedly used prescription drugs in the past 30 days

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