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TUESDAY, June 19 (HealthDay News) -- Medicare's new Part D drug benefit is widening patients' access to drugs, a new study says. The real problem, experts say, lies in finding out if your particular plan covers the medication you need.
That's because more than 1,800 different private health plans across the United States now participate in Part D -- each carrying its own formularies, or drug-coverage charts.
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"Technically, it is possible for physicians to look up every drug for every patient, but in practicality, this study says they aren't doing it because it's just too hard," said lead researcher Dr. Chien-Wen Tseng, a generalist physician faculty scholar at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine.
The result, according to Tseng, is that "12 percent of patients said that they had left the pharmacy empty-handed, because the drug was either too expensive or was not covered."
And a recent survey of U.S. doctors found that 59 percent said their Medicare patients had encountered trouble getting prescriptions filled under Part D, which took effect last year, Tseng said.
"The whole point of Part D is to expand access," she added. "But if people can't figure out which drug is actually paid for in Part D, then we're back to where we were before the drug benefit."
The study, which was funded by the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is published in the June 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Despite encountering some bumps along the way, Medicare's new drug benefit is widening access to medications for the average older American, most experts now agree.
"Part D benefits provide a lot of coverage for people who didn't have it before," said Tseng, who is also affiliated with the Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu.
In their study, Tseng and the study's senior author, Dr. R. Adams Dudley, of the University of California, San Francisco, used data from Medicare's Web site to track the availability of 75 widely used medications for older patients in California and Hawaii. The drugs were drawn from eight classes, including ACE inhibitors, beta-blockers, calcium channel blockers, diuretics, SSRI antidepressants and statins.
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