Prescription charges.

Prescription charges: are they worth it?

While Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland have abandoned charges for prescriptions, in April the English saw prescription charges rise once again, to £8.05 (€10; $13.5) per prescribed item. Labour peer David Lipsey has suggested that the charges are, “a dog’s dinner lacking any basis in fairness or logic and stuffed with anomalies and inconsistencies.” But apart from unfairness, illogicality,...

What impact do prescription drug charges have on efficiency and equity? Evidence from high-income countries

As pharmaceutical expenditure continues to rise, third-party payers in most high-income countries have increasingly shifted the burden of payment for prescription drugs to patients. A large body of literature has examined the relationship between prescription charges and outcomes such as expenditure, use, and health, but few reviews explicitly link cost sharing for prescription drugs to efficie...

Depth charges

A defining moment in President Bill Clinton’s presidency came when he argued that his entanglement with an intern hinged on the definition of the word “is.” Likewise, President Barack Obama’s administration is now taking considerable heat for attempting to redefine the word “gone.” That’s the word that Obama aide (and former Clinton official) Carol Browner used when describing what has happened...

Counting charges

Voltage-gated ion channels of excitable tissue have evolved an exquisite sensitivity to membrane potential. The open probability of a typical potassium or sodium channel, for example, may be increased by two orders of magnitude in response to a depolarization of less than 10 mV (Zagotta et al., 1994; Hirschberg et al., 1995). As recognized by Hodgkin and Huxley (1952), this responsiveness to ch...

[Prescription].