AIMS Drug policy strategies and discussions often use prevalence of drug use as a primary performance indicator. However, three other indicators are at least as relevant: the number of heavy users, total expenditures and total amount consumed. This paper stems from our efforts to develop annual estimates of these three measures for cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana and methamphetamin...

P rescription drugs are playing an increasingly greater role in the health care delivery system: not only are more Americans using prescription medicines than ever before, but the number of prescriptions per user has increased as has the number of days of therapy per prescription. Between 1977 and 1998, the proportion of Americans taking at least one prescription rose from 58 to 66 percent and ...

To control expenditures and use medications appropriately, the Medicare drug coverage program has established pharmacy utilization management (PUM) measures. This article assesses the effects of these strategies on the care of seniors. The literature suggests that although caps on drug benefits lower pharmaceutical costs, they may also increase the use of other health care services and hurt hea...

Life expectancy is a common measure of population health. Macro-perspective based on aggregated data makes it possible to approximate the impact of different levels of pharmaceutical expenditure on general population health status and is often used in cross-country comparisons. The aim of the study was to determine whether there are long-run relations between life expectancy, total healthcare e...

OBJECTIVES This paper investigates the pricing strategy (perfect flat pricing, perfect monotonic pricing, intermediate) used for multiple dosage medications listed in the Ontario Drug Benefit Formulary. METHODS All multiple dosage solid medications containing a single active ingredient newly listed in the Ontario Drug Benefit Formulary between 1996 and 2005 were identified. The relationship b...

BACKGROUND A previous study has suggested that drug price adjustments allow physicians in Taiwan to gain greater profit by prescribing generic drugs. To better understand the effect of price adjustments on physician choice, this study used renin-angiotensin drugs (including angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors [ACEIs] and angiotensin receptor blockers [ARBs]) to examine the impact of price ...

CONTEXT Cost-sharing in US prescription drug coverage plans for elderly persons varies widely. Evaluation of prescription drug use among elderly persons by type of health insurance could provide useful information for designing a Medicare drug program. OBJECTIVE To determine use of effective cardiovascular drugs among elderly persons with coronary heart disease (CHD) by type of health insuran...

BACKGROUND Previously uninsured adults who enroll in the Medicare program at the age of 65 years may have greater morbidity, requiring more intensive and costlier care over subsequent years, than they would if they had been previously insured. METHODS We used longitudinal data from the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study to assess self-reported health care use and expenditur...