The 2009 costs of antibiotics covered by private insurance companies in the U.S. for children younger than 10 years old were estimated to be more than five times higher than the costs in the United Kingdom (U.K.), which are covered by a government universal health plan. These results, from Boston University’s Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, are a follow up of an ongoing comparison of prescription drug costs between the U.S. and U.K. The initial results reported on relative drug costs in 2005. The current updated results appear online in the journal Pharmacotherapy.
The implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has led to renewed attention and debate on U.S. health care costs and the cost of prescription drugs continues to be a major burden to the U.S. economy, particularly those paid by private insurance companies through higher insurance premiums.
The researchers identified 160,000 children younger than 10 years who were prescribed at least one or more drugs in 2009 in both the U.S. and the U.K. Rates of prescribed antibiotics-75 percent of children in the U.S. compared to 50 percent in the U.K., were calculated by dividing the number of children who received at least one prescription for an oral antibiotic by the total number of children in each database in 2009. Similarly, they estimated the rate of use of each antibiotic separately.
In the U.S., the cost of each prescription was ascertained directly from a random sample of users derived from the original electronic records. In the U.K., the duration and cost of each prescription was derived from the electronic medical record and based on the 2009 Prescription Cost Analysis reported by the National Health Service and converted to dollars. Total annual cost for each antibiotic was estimated by multiplying the dollar cost per prescription by the number dispensed.
As was the case in the three prior studies, the annual costs in the U.S., estimated to be more than $2.4 million, were dramatically higher than those in the U.K., estimated to be less than $480,000. Although all of the antibiotics were available in generic formulation in both countries, the percentage of children prescribed an antibiotic was far higher in the U.S. The particular antibiotics commonly prescribed in the U.S. were regularly more costly and prescribed for longer durations.