Utah is paying public employees to travel to Mexico to fill their prescription medications in a program aimed at reducing the high cost of prescription drugs.
In this Jan. 31, 2020, photo, Ann Lovell stands at the security checkpoint before her flight from Salt Lake City International Airport to San Diego. Lovell travels every few months to Tijuana, Mexico, to buy medication for rheumatoid arthritis — with tickets paid for by the state of Utah's public insurer.
In one long, exhausting day, Lovell flies from Salt Lake City to San Diego. There, an escort picks her up and takes her across the border to a Tijuana hospital, where she gets a refill on her prescription. After that, she’s shuttled back to the airport and heads home. The cost difference is so large that the state's insurance program for public employees can pay for each patient’s flight, give them a $500-per-trip bonus and still save tens of thousands of dollars.
The Utah program was created under a 2018 state law dubbed “right to shop,” by Republican Rep. Norm Thurston. The Public Employees Health Program offers it only for people who use a drug on a list of about a dozen medications where the state can get significant savings. Of the 160,000 state and local public employees covered by the insurer, fewer than 400 are eligible, according to Managing Director Chet Loftis.
Provide Rx also works with a dozen or so private companies, some of whom offer similar bonus programs to their staffers, said general manager Javier Ojeda.Though the number of people participating is relatively small, the savings add up quickly. The annual U.S. list price for the drug Lovell takes, Enbrel, is over $62,000 per patient. With the Mexico program, after the cost of the flight and the bonus, the state still cuts its expenses in half.
There have been long been more informal trips across the border elsewhere; Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has taken bus trips with patients from border states into Canada to highlight the cost of prescription drugs. But the Utah program appears to be the only formal state program of its kind, said David Mitchell, a cancer patient and the founder of the advocacy group Patients For Affordable Drugs.
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