The Congress of Delegates of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has approved a resolution calling for the organization “to work with public and private payers to ensure the lowest copays for at least one inhaled steroid and one short-acting, beta adrenergic inhaler in their drug formularies with any copays at the lowest tier level, and one rate-controlling spacer for which any copays would be in the lowest tier level.”
The final resolution combined two resolutions submitted to the reference committee for asthma. The first of those resolutions dealt with pricing of metered dose inhalers in the wake of the CFC to HFA transition, which left no generic inhalers available in the US market. The second resolution referred to the fact that insurance companies do not cover spacers that provide feedback to help users control inhalation rates.
One delegate told the committee, “Patients get that deer-in-the-headlights look when I tell them how much their medication will cost.” Kurtis Elward, AAFP’s liaison to the Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s National Asthma Education and Prevention Program, who was also an alternate delegate to the meeting, commented that the high cost of asthma inhalers is a “significant impediment” to treatment, stating bluntly, “It’s keeping us from providing the care we want to provide for our patients and the care that they need.”
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