S P O N S O R E D B Y :
False Hope: Promising 'Racial' Heart Drug Fails to Reach Blacks
Compiled by the DiversityInc staff
October 17, 2006
Many blacks were optimistic that
BiDil would lower the disproportionately high incidence of heart disease in
their community when the drug came on the market last summer. But now the
prognosis is bleak.
High co-payments and inadequate
healthcare coverage are preventing blacks from accessing BiDil, which made
history as the first drug designed for their benefit.
In 2005, the hospitalization rate
for black heart-failure patients ages 65 to 74 was more than double that of
whites—19.2 versus 8.3 per 1,000 people, according to the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality.
|
DiversityInc Bookstore |
|
|
Losing the Race - Self-Sabotage in Black America
John McWhorter explores the three main components of this cultural
virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism
that are making blacks their own worst enemies in the struggle
for success.
For More Information | |
But only 1 percent of the 750,000
blacks (subscription required) with heart disease use BiDil, which the Food
and Drug Administration approved 16 months ago, reports The Wall Street Journal
(WSJ).
Fighting with health
plans
The disparities have become so
drastic that BiDil producer NitroMed is threatening to take legal action unless
insurers start allowing the drug to be covered. The biotech company sent letters
to more than 12 health plans advising of its intentions after efforts to reduce
consumer costs through wholesale discounts proved
ineffective.
"We'd much rather have the plans
as our customers and we don't want to be litigants," NitroMed spokesperson Jane
Kramer told the WSJ. "But if it becomes necessary to fight for our intellectual
property, we will."
Health plans argue that there is
no evidence to suggest BiDil's superior effectiveness compared with generic
brands and thus no reason for its high cost, which the Department of Veterans
Affairs estimates to be between $1,382 and $2,675 per patient per year.
NitroMed CEO Jerry Karabelas
maintains that BiDil's benefits surpass the generics. He cites a clinical trial
that showed BiDil reduces mortality by 43 percent within a year of use for black
heart-disease patients who had tried alternative treatments.
The Centers for Medicaid &
Medicare Services (CMS) sides with the insurers.
CMS commissioned the American
Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology to investigate the
matter a few months ago. They concluded that use of generic brands was suitable
to treat heart disease and did not breach patient rights. But it's not that
simple.
Heart-disease patients have to
take one generic pill and one and a half tablets of a different generic pill
three times daily to obtain the same benefits as one BiDil pill.
This easily could be confusing,
particularly for older people, the primary intended beneficiaries of CMS's
controversial Medicare Part D. The policy stripped BiDil coverage from tens of
thousands of blacks suffering from congestive heart failure, reports the
WSJ.
"If that were white patients,
nobody in America would tell them, 'Excuse me, I want you to go buy a drug for
angina and another for hypertension, and I want you to go home and cut them, and
I want you to take multiple pills a day on top of all the [other drugs] you
got," National Minority Health Month Foundation Executive Director Gary Puckrein
told the WSJ. If the healthcare system "were doing it to whites there would be
an uproar."
Still, CMS senior officer Jeffrey
Kelman says every Part D plan covers BiDil, generic alternatives, or both. If
that's true, why the discrepancy in access?
The underlying problem is the
historically stratified nature of the healthcare system along economic and
racial/ethnic lines. Lower socioeconomic status compounds healthcare-access and
quality-related problems for blacks, whose household income is nearly half that
of whites—$36,076 and $62,300, respectively—according to the Census Bureau. In
2005, 21 percent of blacks ages 65 and older were uninsured, outnumbering the
percentage of whites (0.7 percent) in that situation by 30 to 1.
Medicare Part D has done little to
expand drug coverage for blacks. According to managed-care consultant Amundsen
Group, about 70 percent of blacks ages 45 and older either have to pay high
co-payments or do not have coverage for BiDil, reports the
WSJ.
To learn more about the unique
challenges facing communities of color, read DiversityInc®'s
May issue on healthcare disparities.
|
DiversityInc Bookstore |
Motivations,
sources of support
and conflict, and
strategies for success.
|
Cracking
the Corporate Code:
The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives
This
book looks at the factors that have framed the careers of 32
African-American executives, whose accomplishments have made
valuable contributions to organizations like Pepsi, Kraft, GE,
Merrill Lynch, and Prudential.
For More Information
| |
More from Today's Diversity News
<< PREVIOUS ITEM | NEXT ITEM >>
Send Your Comments About This Article Now
©DiversityInc. Reproduction in any format is absolutely prohibited.
|
digg this | 
mixx! | 
reddit
del.icio.us
Newsvine | 
| 
