A Healthcare Affordability Gift for That Special MAGA Person in Your Life

Affordability isn’t a hoax despite what the self-proclaimed stable genius tells his gullible cult followers. It’s real, and nowhere is the lack of it more real than in healthcare. You already know that.

But just in case you need a fact or two to put an uninformed MAGA-following relative in their place this holiday season, Epic Research, the research arm of EHR giant Epic, gave you an early gift on Dec. 4.

Epic Research published a study that connected medication adherence with a medication user’s type of health insurance. Not surprisingly, the study correlated better insurance with better adherence presumably because better insurance made prescription drugs more affordable for the user.

The study is based on prescriptions ordered and filled for five million patients between Jan. 1, 2022, and July 1, 2025, for drugs to treat three common medical conditions: high blood pressure, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes. The researchers extracted the U.S. study data from Epic’s Cosmos database, which has more than 300 million patient records from 1,800 hospitals and more than 41,000 clinics in the U.S., Canada, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

The researchers calculated the percentage of patients’ primary adherence (they filled their prescriptions within 30 days) and secondary adherence (consistently filled their prescriptions over a year) by type of drug and by type of insurance.

Patients with commercial insurance and likely lower out-of-pocket costs for their drugs consistently had higher primary adherence rates than self-pay patients who paid 100% out of their own pockets for their prescription medications.

• 85% primary adherence for blood pressure meds compared with 66%
• 85% primary adherence for cholesterol meds compared with 68%
• 78% primary adherence for diabetes meds compared with 63%

Patients with traditional Medicare coverage, Medicare Advantage or Medicaid coverage fell somewhere in between commercial and self-pay for primary adherence on each type of drug over the study period. The results were similar for secondary adherence, although patients with Medicare Advantage topped commercially insured patients for each type of drug.

Published studies from Epic Research don’t discuss the findings or speculate on what they mean. They just present the data they found. I don’t work for Epic.

We all know what’s going on here. Self-pay patients have choices to make each month when they pay their bills. If other household items are more expensive, they’re less likely to fill their prescriptions. Self-pay patients are also less likely to fill their prescriptions if their medication costs more each month.

Affordability is real. It’s real for real people. It’s only a hoax to someone who cheats, steals and borrows billions of dollars and yet refuses to pay their bills.

Thanks for reading.