By: Mary Beth McGee
It’s basic economics: when demand is high, supply get low. And so Americans who find themselves in need of drugs like chloroquine are afraid they won’t be able to get their hands on it.
Just-released research by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) highlights the anxiety faced by some Americans in need of specific drugs to fight COVID- 19.
The research examined patterns of prescriptions across the country from the middle of February to the end of April using information gleaned from roughly 58,000 pharmacies. What it turned up is that in the middle of March, the number of prescriptions being written for a short-term supply of the drugs rose to 45,858, an increase from 2,208 during the same period the year before – an increase of 2,000 percent.
“This was a really stunning finding,” Dr. Haider Warraich, the lead author of the study and a cardiologist and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told the New York Times in an interview.
“We have a system in which it’s very easy to prescribe a medication off label,” or for a medical condition for which a drug has not been specifically approved, he added. “It’s much harder to enroll a patient in a clinical trial. But in the end that is what’s going to help us fill this data-free zone with the data that can guide us.”
According to the research, prescriptions that had been written for chronic conditions like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, acid reflux, thyroid disorders and depression “spiked in early to mid-March and then fell sharply from late March through April. Prescriptions for the cholesterol-lowering medication Atorvastatin, for example, rose 30 percent in mid-March and then by late April were down almost 10 percent compared with the same period in 2019,” the Times added.
It was not the first unsettling news to come from JAMA during the pandemic. As Larry Levitt noted at jamanetwork.com, the nation is at risk of an historic decrease in job-based health insurance.
“The Kaiser Family Foundation recently did an analysis based on people who had filed for unemployment benefits as of early May and found that 26.8 million people in households with a job loss are at risk of losing their health insurance. If that happened, it would almost double the number of people uninsured,” JAMA reported. “Now, fortunately, there are reasons why that is unlikely to happen. In some cases, employers may be maintaining benefits for furloughed workers, at least for a period of time. And some unemployed workers may go back to work as state orders requiring business closures loosen.”
