Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Online tool enables beneficiaries to look up, compare prices.

With the Sept. 15 launch of a new price-comparison feature on the Medicare Web site, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson moved one modest step closer to his promised goal: a more transparent consumer marketplace for prescription drugs.

Using the feature, beneficiaries can plug in the name of a drug they currently take for one of several common conditions and generate comparison price information about both brand-name and generic drugs that might be suitable substitutes. The feature is accessible on the Web at www.Medicare.gov or by phoning 1-800-Medicare and is limited to 52 very commonly used drugs that HHS says represent about a quarter of all beneficiary drug spending.

By listing possible brand-name substitutes - which have different active ingredients and possibly different mechanisms of action than the target drug - the new feature goes beyond many previous comparison schemes that list generic substitutes only. Because of legitimate concerns that patients react differently to differently formulated medications, thus making some substitutions potentially harmful or clinically non-beneficial, HHS is stressing that beneficiaries should take drug lists they generate with the Lower Cost Rx Comparison Tool to their physicians for consultation.

Drug makers are less than thrilled with the program, Thompson said, without giving details, at the launch press conference. Pharmaceutical companies "would rather we not do it," he said.

Using the tool, a beneficiary can generate either a list of actual prices he or she would pay for substitute drugs using a specific Medicare discount drug card, or a list of national average prices, if no card is specified. Conditions for which comparisons are available include high blood pressure, allergies, high cholesterol, pain and inflammation, and stomach irritation and ulcers.