a senior research associate with the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “On the one hand, the drug companies want to sell more drugs that are more costly, and they’re helping people do that by providing these cards,” says Paul Fronstin, PhD. And that didn’t seem like a good idea at all. “It’s a game changer for sure,” she says. Such offers range across the board, but the underlying theme, to Wood, looked like an obvious attempt to scuttle copayments and much of what they are designed to do. A viral message made its way around the Internet, pointing consumers down the trail of web sites like « Another web-site includes offers for more than 300 therapies. Ads were showing up in popular magazines. “We started investigating that, and we found them everywhere,” says Wood. Members who would otherwise face a rising scale of co-payments for generics, preferred, and nonpreferred brands could either greatly reduce their out-of-pocket costs or eliminate them altogether. “But then we started seeing these were a charge-card kind of thing with a renewable copay discount,” adds Wood. After all, she couldn’t track who got a sample or why, so the coupons could take the initial sting out of an individual’s cost without leaving the insurer blind to what was going on. ![]() If this could be a replacement for handing out drug samples at doctors’ offices, coupons that cover the first round of copayments for new drugs could be “a really good thing,” thought Wood, vice president of pharmacy and health quality programs for the not-for-profit Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan, in Albany, N.Y. The first time Eileen Wood heard about the new co-payment subsidies that pharmaceutical companies were offering, they sounded like a pretty good idea.
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