The Gateway Pharmacy at 165 Nutt Road in Phoenixville, PA. has begun an exciting new program.

For the past month, all unwanted, used and expired medication prescriptions that are no longer in need for use by local community customers and non consumers can be brought into the Gateway Pharmacy for disposal, free of charge.

This program is called the Take Back Program which has been established by two of the Gateway Pharmacists Jenn Szilagyi and Kristin Katra.

Szilagyi and Katra encourage that all who have any unwanted stored drug prescription medications within their home medicine cabinets or in other storage areas within their homes may bring them into the Gateway Pharmacy where these drugs will be turned over to a reputable medication disposal company for proper disposal.

Read the full article: Gateway Pharmacy disposes of old medications

A new report on retail prices of brand-name drugs shows the 217 products most used by older Americans increased by an average of 8.3 percent during 2009, the largest increase in years, even as inflation was negative.

Over the last five years, according to the report to be released on Wednesday by the senior lobby AARP, the retail prices for the most popular brand-name drugs increased 41.5 percent, while the consumer price index rose 13.3 percent. An AARP official called for measures to hold down drug prices.

Drug industry officials challenged the finding, however, saying select brand-name prices did not reflect the reality of more people using low-price generic drugs. Generics now account for about 75 percent of all dispensed prescriptionsin the United States, according to IMS Health, a research firm.

The industry pointed to a broader survey of drug prices showing they rose by 3.4 percent during 2009. The survey, conducted by the government for its official Consumer Price Index, includes generic as well as brand-name drug prices, Jonathan Church, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said on Tuesday.

Find out more.

It has long been one of the most vexing causes of America’s skyrocketing health costs: people not taking their medicine.

About 75,000 people across the region will soon have to choose: mail order or pharmacy.

In March, Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania announced a new prescription plan called Select Home Delivery. Any customer with recurring prescriptions for medications used to treat chronic health issues like asthma, diabetes or high cholesterol will have to choose whether to continue filling their prescriptions at a pharmacy or sign up for mail-order delivery. The mail-order option does not extend to prescriptions for antibiotics, pain relievers and other medications that are not typically refilled every month, Blue Cross officials said.

The new plan begins Saturday and will affect about 12 percent of the 585,000 people who have Blue Cross insurance across the region, said spokesman Anthony Matrisciano. Blue Cross is using Express Scripts, based in St. Louis, as the mail-order provider. Express Scripts has been its mail-order provider since 2000.

Blue Cross officials said moving to mail order may result in significant savings for customers and to Blue Cross, although officials could not say how much the company would save.

Local pharmacists, however, are concerned the new prescription plan could cause problems for customers and, worse, drive smaller pharmacies out of business. Many, including Dan Iannielli, have urged customers to sign a petition protesting the new program and have started a letter-writing campaign.

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Making simple changes like getting people to take their medicines exactly as directed or to refill their prescriptions on time could save employers and their workers as much as $163 billion a year in healthcare costs, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts Inc identified various behaviors including brand loyalty, procrastinating on refills and occasional forgetfulness, that increase treatment costs.

“This is the first time we’ve looked at the behavioral factors that are driving spending,” chief scientist Bob Nease commented about Express Scripts’ annual drug trends report.

The cost of these behaviors is a staggering $1 out of every $5 spent on prescription drugs, which account for 10 percent of the $2.3 trillion Americans spend on healthcare each year.

“When you slice it that way, you get this eye-popping figure of $163 billion,” Nease said in a telephone interview.

The report outlines ways for companies and patients to make people aware of the common habits that can increase the cost of healthcare in the United States as the nation looks for ways to pay for its newly passed healthcare reform legislation.

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The disagreement between Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania and local pharmacies over a mail-order prescription option for the insurer’s customers illustrates one of the biggest difficulties of reforming American health care.

Any proposal to cut health care costs invariably hurts somebody in the system. In the case of the Blue Cross proposal, it’s neighborhood drug stores that will suffer.

Blue Cross says the new program – Select Home Delivery – will allow members to receive mail-order delivery of “maintenance medications” for chronic conditions. The insurer says volume discounts and lower copayments will cut costs. Local pharmacists say Blue Cross has stacked the deck against them by making it difficult for clients to stay with their neighborhood drug stores. Blue Cross counters that switching to mail order delivery is strictly optional, but every member will have to make a choice.

It remains to be seen whether neighborhood pharmacies will become the latest businesses to fall to the economies of scale, a great wave of consolidation that has swallowed everything from the corner market to the local bank.

If Congress manages to pass a health care reform bill, no matter how modest, the wheels will be set in motion for changes that are long overdue. These changes must reduce waste, cut back on unnecessary tests and scale back on America’s “there’s a pill for everything” mentality.

With so many well-heeled interests invested in the system, proposals to streamline it not only generate opposition, but sometimes bring hysterical reactions, such as the fear that President Obama wanted to establish “death panels.” As the president said at Arcadia University on Monday, “Health care is hard. It’s easily misrepresented. It’s easily misunderstood.”

Concerns about the cost of current health care proposals are legitimate. Americans should be terrified about the mushrooming national deficit. But those who say Congress should not make fundamental changes to a system that accounts for one-sixth of the economy ignore the reality that unchecked health costs eventually will bankrupt our children.

Change has to start somewhere and those changes inevitably hurt someone in the system. As the prescription wars demonstrate, it may be the little guy – in this case, the neighborhood pharmacy – who feels the pain first.

People insured by Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania face a choice of whether to fill prescriptions at a pharmacy or through the mail.

Starting May 1, Blue Cross makes mail orders the preferred choice for customers in group plans. Blue Cross will allow customers to buy maintenance drugs from pharmacies for two months. In the third month, Blue Cross will block sales unless customers indicate that they choose to keep using a store rather than mail order.

“How do we lose these choices? We’re in America. We should have choices,” Joseph Lauricella, owner of the Medicine Shoppe in Hazleton, said.

Across America, however, people are receiving incentives to choose mail rather than stores like Lauricella owns. A typical offer allows customers to buy three months’ worth of medicine through the mail for the price they would pay for two months’ worth at a store.

Those drugs are supplied through mail-order pharmacies owned by companies that manage pharmacy benefits for the insurers and negotiate prices with the drug makers.

For its pharmacy benefit manager, Blue Cross uses Express Scripts, a Fortune 500 company based in St. Louis.

Prior to May 1, Blue Cross customers could sign up to purchase medications from the mail-order pharmacy of Express Scripts, but now they will be enrolled in the mail-order plan unless they opt out.

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Growth of prescription drug revenue worldwide will probably decline 4 percent to 6 percent next year, the lowest rate in at least a decade, according to a forecast released on Thursday.

The forecast by IMS Health, which tracks sales of prescription drugs in 220 countries, cited increased sales of generic drugs and the global recession as being among the reasons for the decline.

In the United States, growth is expected to be about 5 percent, an improvement from last year, according to a five-year forecast from IMS. That is also an increase from the research firm’s estimates from several months ago, and the new estimates indicate global sales of prescription drugs could reach $1 trillion a year in 2013.

A fifth of all growth in pharmaceutical sales will come from China between now and then, with the pharmaceutical market there growing at more than 20 percent a year, according to IMS. By 2013, China, the world’s most populous country, should become its third-biggest prescription drug market — after the United States and Japan — with about $80 billion in 2013 sales. China was No. 10 six years ago.

IMS projects worldwide sales growth of 4 to 7 percent each year through 2013.

“We are seeing the economic downturn influencing both patient behavior and payer strategies,” said Murray Aitken, senior vice president of the company’s Healthcare Insight analysis division.

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“The bus will tour the state the week of July 27. So far, the PPA has helped nearly 300,000 Pennsylvanians, including about 26,000 in Philadelphia, 14,000 in Pittsburgh, almost 7,000 in the Wilkes Barre/Scranton region and about 4,500 in Allentown.”

This will be the bus’ 23rd tour in Pennsylvania in four years.

Says PhRMA:  “Patients seeking help can call a toll-free number (1-888-4-PPA-NOW; 1-888-477-2669) to talk to a trained operator or access the PPA Web site (www.pparx.org ). Or, of course, they can work with specialists on board the ‘Help is Here Express’ if it rolls into their town. It only takes 10 to 15 minutes to determine if someone may qualify for free or nearly free medicines.”

Pennsylvania residents should check their local newspapers and TV stations to find out when and if the bus will visit their area.

For the sake of patients and state taxpayers, Pennsylvania should continue to avoid carving drug coverage out of the Medicaid managed care program. Separating medicines from the rest of health care to be managed by the government disrupts the ability of managed care organizations to use pharmaceutical treatments as a way to help control disease and reduce overall health costs. Many prescription medications – when used in combination with healthy diet and exercise – help to prevent patients from developing full-blown disease and expensive, debilitating surgeries and hospitalizations are avoided.

Medicines are cost-effective and account for only 10 cents of each health care dollar. They should remain part of an integrated managed care system that emphasizes quality patient care. With a government-managed drug benefit, poor Medicaid patients who depend on the state for treatment could fall victim to officials who are not health professionals and whose predominant focus is program cost-cutting.

The availability of a wide range of medication options can be particularly important in the fight against chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Governor Rendell last year said chronic medical conditions are “the leading cause of death and disability in Pennsylvania and account for 80 percent of our health care costs.”

The taxpayer benefits from maintaining the state’s current Medicaid system because with managed care, health plans receive a fixed amount per patient and then assume responsibility for covering unexpected cost increases. In contrast, state government-run fee-for-service programs assume all of the risk of unexpected expenses and taxpayer money is used to cover the costs.

In the end, a Medicaid drug carve-out in Pennsylvania could hurt both the state’s most vulnerable patients and taxpayers and that hardly seems like a wise prescription.