1 in 7 patients with HIV use a cost-saving strategy with their medicine

New CDC data reveal that nearly 1 in 7 HIV patients say they use a cost-saving measure with their medication, which they attributed to insufficient help from a federal HIV drug assistance program, not having Medicaid coverage, and having private insurance with high drug costs. Among these patients, 7% said that they don't take their medication due to costs: Some 4% of these said they took less medicine than was prescribed, and 6% said they delayed filling their prescriptions. Nearly 1 in 10 reported asking their physicians for a lower-cost medicine, while a small minority reported getting the drugs from another country or using alternative therapies. The new data come as the Trump administration works to reach its goal of reducing new HIV transmissions by 90% in the next 10 years. 

A final note: A study that I recently covered in this newsletter, on the effect of police shootings on the health of black infants, has now been retracted by the author of that paper. There were errors in the data, and when the author repeated his analysis with the corrected data, the new findings did not replicate his original results.