Do pharmaceutical marketing and pricing practices reduce compliance with cardiovascular medications?
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most prevalent condition treated in primary care practice and contributes to the socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequities in health that characterize the U.S. Treating hypertension and hyperlipidemia, CVD’s major risk factors, can significantly reduce the risk of severe cardiovascular outcomes. Although safe and effective medications are available for this purpose, maintaining healthy blood pressure and cholesterol is difficult, particularly for people from disadvantaged populations. Conventional wisdom says that providing free pharmaceutical samples should help patients to take their medicine but a recent study in Medical Care found that “individuals receiving samples have higher prescription expenditures than their counterparts.” The authors concluded that “these findings suggest that sample recipients remain disproportionately burdened by prescription costs even after sample receipt.”1 While there are many factors that contribute to this problem
