Having insurance coverage alone doesn’t guarantee that people can afford or would be willing to pay continuously for chronic disease medications like Ozempic, a new, large-scale study finds.
Looking at insured patients with type 2 diabetes and heart failure, researchers found that people with higher prescription copayments were less likely to consistently take glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1) and sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) — two classes of drugs that yield additional, long-term benefits compared with older treatments but are also costlier.
For example, people with high copayments, defined as over $50, were about 50% less likely to adhere to GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Trulicity than those with low copayments, defined as less than $10, according to the study published in JAMA Network Open Thursday.
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