Doctors Prescribing Expensive Drugs

[jeffrey]

Doctors often prescribe newer, more expensive drugs for high blood pressure instead of the ones recommended under medical guidelines, and the practice is costing the nation more than $1 billion a year, researchers say. The researchers did not examine why, exactly, doctors go with the costlier drugs, but they speculated that aggressive drug-company advertising may be one reason.

The study of Pennsylvania's drug-assistance program looked at more than 133,000 patients who filled more than 2 million prescriptions for hypertension medicine in 2001. The prescriptions cost the state $48.5 million. About 40% of the time, patients were prescribed different drugs than those called for under medical guidelines, according to the study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. Getting doctors to prescribe the preferred treatments would have saved the state $11.6 million in 2001, the study found... [read more at usatoday.com]