Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: The Pros and Cons Of OTC Hormonal Birth Control; The Cost Of Prescription Drugs Must Fall
Ninertimes: Contraceptives Without Prescriptions
I initially felt relieved when I heard that birth control would be available in North Carolina without a prescription. I thought, "Great! I won't have to endure the stink eye adults give me when I sit in my OBGYN's waiting room!" While access to birth control without the need for a prescription may sound ideal, there are more caveats to this law than one might think. The law was passed by the North Carolina General Assembly with overwhelming bipartisan support and went into effect in February of this year. It states that people in North Carolina are no longer required to have a doctor's prescription to obtain hormonal birth control. North Carolina is one of over 15 states to enact a law for over-the-counter access to birth control. Contraceptive pills and patches are now available for purchase at pharmacies and drugstores following a brief assessment prepared by the CDC and administered by a qualified pharmacist. (Sylvia Sriniwass, 3/29)
BridgeMI: Michigan Must Do More To Lower The Cost Of Prescription Drugs
Affordable, accessible health care should be a right to all, but too many Michiganders are being left out, especially when it comes to affording lifesaving prescription medications whose prices have continued to skyrocket regardless of state, national or global economic circumstances. (Winnie Brinks and Harshini Jayasuriya, 3/23)
New England Journal of Medicine: A New Way To Contain Unaffordable Medication Costs — Exercising The Government’s Existing Rights
Strong proposed legislation permitting the U.S. government to negotiate Medicare drug prices has been weakened after pushback from the pharmaceutical industry. The government’s costs for filling prescriptions in federal programs will therefore probably continue to spiral upward. Yet the government has already paid once for a growing number of these medications by means of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which spends more than $40 billion each year to fund biomedical research. We believe that medicines discovered at public expense should be affordable. (Alfred B. Engelberg, J.D., et al, 3/24)
New England Journal of Medicine: Addressing Vaccine Inequity — Covid-19 Vaccines As A Global Public Good
The first peer-reviewed clinical trial evidence that a Covid-19 vaccine provided robust protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection was published in the Journal in December 2020,1 less than a year after the sequence of the viral genome was reported. This unprecedentedly rapid development of vaccines was a scientific triumph. In the year since, about 62% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and 54% have completed the primary vaccine series.2 This would appear to be a landmark success in global health mobilization. (David J. Hunter, F.Med.Sci, et al, 3/24)
