Biopharmaceutical innovation enables people to live longer, healthier lives and avoid often more disruptive, unpleasant, or expensive treatments. Many fatal illnesses have been avoided, cured, or become chronic and treatable conditions due to pharmaceuticals. Access to medication is integral to improved health and wellbeing.
Managing chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and HIV is critical to improving lives and controlling escalating costs for patients. Medicines are often the most efficient and cost effective means of dealing with chronic conditions. Vaccines are an essential component of preventing and avoiding disease altogether. Cost containment measures that aim to reduce short-term expenditures by discouraging the appropriate and proper use of medicines could hurt both patients and payers in the long run.
- Age adjusted cancer mortality fell 17 percent between 1991 and 2006. In this short time frame, 25 percent of the decline in mortality is attributable to drug innovation.1 Between 1975 and 2003, 5-year cancer survival rates increased by 31 percent. Over half of this gain in this time period is due to drug innovation.2
- Since 1960, age-adjusted death rates from heart disease have declined 54 percent. Medication therapy accounts for approximately 30 percent of the reduction in heart attack mortality:3
- In 2001 alone, antihypertensives prevented 86,000 premature deaths across the U.S. population by reducing blood pressure between 10 percent and 13 percent in patients during the prior two years. This treatment has generated a benefit-to-cost-ratio of 6:1 for patients and the health system.4
- Effectively controlling blood pressure would save as many lives as preventing all annual accidentrelated deaths or similarly preventing all annual deaths caused from pneumonia and influenza combined.5
- Patients taking Alzheimer's medications are 2.5 times more likely to progress slowly with the disease and have a significantly lower risk of nursing home admission after 2 years on therapy compared to patients not on treatment.6
- HIV mortality dropped 62 percent between 1995 and 1997 after the introduction of highly active antiretroviral drugs while monthly medical costs dropped 16 percent over roughly the same period.7
Medicines extend and improve lives often at a lower cost than alternatives, such as surgery or hospitalization, and frequently with less disruption to patients' lives relative to alternatives. Advancing new treatments and cures and helping patients obtain the medicines they need should be a goal of all stakeholders in the health care system. It is important for all stakeholders to understand how medicines can save lives, improve productivity, and potentially reduce long-term health care costs.
How Patients and Health Care Professionals Benefit
Medicines help to improve and extend the lives of patients while giving providers more efficient weapons against serious chronic diseases.
How the Health Care System Benefits
Treating diseases with medicines is often cheaper than other medical interventions such as surgery and hospitalizations. The cost effective nature of pharmaceutical treatments helps temper rising health care costs.
What It Means for Pfizer
Pfizer actively supports lowering all barriers for patients who need medicines. Pfizer believes that patients, providers, and the health care system will benefit from the value of medicines when all patients are treated with medicines prescribed by their doctors without delays caused by access restrictions.
Copyright © 2012 Pfizer Inc All Rights Reserved | Contact Us | Terms of Use | Privacy Statement