STAT Plus: Help how? Patient charities favor the insured and more expensive brand-name drugs
Amid rising scrutiny of the ties between patient charities and drug makers, a new study finds that nearly all of the programs run by the six largest organizations failed to provide assistance to people without insurance and were also more likely to cover expensive brand-name medicines than generics.
The study found that of 274 different disease-specific programs run by the charities in 2018, 267 programs — or a whopping 97% — required insurance coverage for eligibility. Meanwhile, brand-name drugs that cost more than $10,000 for each Medicare beneficiary in 2016 were three times more frequently covered by charities than generics.
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