Tag: medication

Health
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Prescriptions or groceries?

Some Americans are making sacrifices and taking risks to afford their meds   Rising drug prices have become a public health crisis, forcing too many Americans into making some tough choices. In a recent Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs’ poll of 1,037 U.S. adults who currently take a prescription medication, one third said they were hit with higher drug prices at the pharmacy counter in the past year. And while the average increase was $39 extra out-of-pocket, one in 10 reported paying $100 or more over what they’d previously paid. Those higher prices led nearly 40 percent of people to […]

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Drug Savings, Patient Assistance Programs
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What is a Patient Assistance Program?

More and more Americans struggle everyday with the rising cost of medications.  This can lead to families making difficult decisions, often forgoing needed meds in order to cover the cost of food, housing, or transportation.  However, there is help available.  Many pharmaceutical companies, along with some pharmacies and non-profit groups, manage Patient Assistance Programs (or PAPs) that offer the medication at reduced or no cost.  So how do these programs work?  And where can you find one?   What is a PAP? Patient Assistance Programs are programs usually designed by a pharmaceutical company to offer medications to low income or […]

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Health
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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 […]

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Medicine Safety
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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 […]

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Drug Savings, Patient Assistance Programs
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All About Resources for Epilepsy

Over 2 million Americans suffer from epilepsy, with about 1 in 26 developing epilepsy in their lifetime. Epilepsy is a neurological condition that affects the nervous system causing seizures, and is the fourth most common neurological disorder affecting people of all ages. It is also commonly referred to as a seizure disorder. Epilepsy is different for everyone, as there are many different types of seizures. “A person is diagnosed with epilepsy if they have had at least two seizures that were not caused by some known and reversible medical condition… The seizures in epilepsy may be related to a brain […]

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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.