Prescription drug costs in primary and secondary care Essay

Prescription drug costs in primary and secondary care - Essay Example For a long time, disease management programs have been developed by physicians. However, their involvement focuses naturally on the health care aspects. Reduction of the costs of care is often a beneficial by-product of such disease management programs. Reduction of cost in most cases is a secondary goal and, importantly, not always achieved. Since economic forces continue to be important drivers of health care policies and managed care programs, it is important for the physician to understand some aspects of medical economics - that there are certain vulnerable groups in the society who cannot afford the ever rising costs of prescription drugs. The concept of disease management is relevant to care needed by a population with a given disease, instead of focusing on individually taken decisions during multiple physician-patient interactions. Disease management principles have always been considered as health care principles; they were indeed adopted from the business world. However, health differs from money. One cannot trade health across time or between individuals, and it is not stable, but affected by illness severity. Moreover, many health outcomes are irreversible. Other aspects of a market-based approach do not fit well with health care, because most health risks are unique as noted by Dewar (2009). Individual values placed on those risks differ widely among individuals. Therefore, health can be converted to monetary terms only with difficulty (Netten and Curtis, 2002). Health care industry is so complex that economic evaluations are not easy even when estimated for a population. Cost identification or minimization analysis simply estimates the costs to produce an intervention. For disease management, this analysis is used to identify interventions where cutting costs would seem to have little impact on outcome, such as provision of drugs at lower costs. However, as simple as this seems, estimating costs of health care services can be very difficult, and