Name:   lotowner - Subject:   "Walking Away from Prescriptions" Date:   10/13/2010 8:29:40 AM

Growing numbers of Americans with health insurance are walking away from their prescriptions at the pharmacy counter, the latest indication that efforts to contain costs may be curbing health-care consumption.

A review of insurance-claims data shows that so-called abandonment -- when a patient refuses to purchase or pick up a prescription that was filled and packaged by a pharmacist -- was up 55% in the second quarter of this year, compared with four years earlier.

The phenomenon coincides with rising co-payments for many drugs and increasing enrollment in high-deductible insurance plans that require patients to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars out of pocket before insurance kicks in.

Patients are deserting prescriptions for the most expensive drugs most often, according to the review by Wolters Kluwer Pharma Solutions, a health-care data company. For instance, nearly one in 10 new prescriptions for brand-name drugs were abandoned by people with commercial health plans in the quarter, up 88% from four years earlier, when the data were first tracked and before the recession began. Abandonment of generic drugs was higher, too, according to the data