Evaluating the Impact on Pharmacy Practices of a Law Requiring the Posting of Drug Prices

Résumé fourni par la source

Posting price lists of most frequently purchased retail drugs under Section 4333 of the California Pharmaceutical Law offers consumers the opportunity to make more effective price comparisons. The same information also permits examination of the pricing structure of an entire local market, and it was just such an examination which was undertaken in the present study for 100 items on sale at 24 pharmacies in the northern region of the San Francisco Bay area. Wide price differentials were found to exist. Pharmacies charging higher prices were found to do so across their entire product line: the higher prices were not related to better service but primarily to monopolistic practices. It was also concluded that if posting has so far failed to bring about lower prices, it may be due to token compliance. The study examined computer simulation techniques for measuring the effectiveness of small, unsophisticated pharmaceutical price surveys, and the accuracy of such surveys was shown to be extremely high.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.