Category: Prescription Drugs

Lowering Your Diabetes Costs

Tips from Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs With approximately 29 million Americans affected by diabetes, or 9.3 percent of the U.S. population, the costs associated with the disease are a growing problem. As of 2012, the total healthcare costs for diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. is roughly $245 billion, an increase of 41 percent since 2007, and according to the American Diabetes Association, a person with diabetes spends on average $13,700 per year on care. National Diabetes Month, held every November, is a time of year to raise awareness about diabetes prevention and treatment, and also to discuss how high […]

Americans Still Taking Risks with Needed Medications

Plus: How to lower your drug costs Americans take a lot of medicines – and many resort to risky behaviors to afford them. That’s according to a recent national telephone poll by public-education project Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs.  Forty-four percent of Americans take an average of 4.5 prescription drugs; 16 percent say they take 7 or more. To afford those medications, more than half (57 percent) of those polled reported taking steps in the last year—some of them potentially dangerous—to curb high drug costs. That included not filling a prescription (17 percent), skipping a scheduled dose (14 percent), and […]

Medication Safety at Home

We hear in the media of mistakes made in hospitals including errors in administering medication. A new study shows that a child is improperly medicated at home every eight minutes. The study published by the journal Pediatrics is based on data from the National Poison Database System between the years of 2002 and 2012. The statistics don’t reflect the real scope of the problem since not everyone reports an error to poison control or may even be aware they made a mistake. In the 10-year time period, 696,937 children younger than 6 years old experienced out-of-hospital medication errors. The most common […]

Introducing GAP: The Generic Assistance Program

NeedyMeds has always been a leading resource for information on patient assistance programs to help cover the costs of brand name drugs. There are hundreds of programs providing free or low-cost brand name medication, but there is yet to be an assistance program to help with the cost of expensive generic drugs. It is a common misconception that generic medications are all inexpensive. The truth is that there are many that cost hundreds of dollars per year, and are essential to the health of many people. With the help of Rx Outreach, the largest non-profit pharmacy in the country, NeedyMeds […]

Resources for Advocates

Here at NeedyMeds our focus has always been to help patients who can’t afford their medications and healthcare costs with information on patient assistance programs, free-clinics, co-pay assistance and more. Beyond working directly with patients in need, we also have a variety of resources available to help patient advocates. The patient advocate community plays an essential role in our mission to help people who cannot afford the costs of healthcare. Many patients do not have access to a computer or the Internet, and rely on patient advocates to help them. In this blog post, we are going to highlight some […]

About Us

Welcome to the NeedyMeds Voice! We look forward to presenting you with timely, provocative pieces on healthcare reform, patient advocacy, medication and healthcare access, and other health-related news. Our goals are to educate, enlighten, and elucidate; together, we will try to make sense of the myriad and ongoing healthcare-related changes in the U.S. today.