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With escalating health care costs, some people, encouraged by their insurance company, are lowering copayments by buying a pill for twice the dose needed and cutting it in half.
A voluntary UnitedHealth Group program gives patients the opportunity to save as much as $300 annually in copayment costs per prescription. A slew of research demonstrates that for many medications, pill-splitting is entirely safe when done correctly.
Because of the way drugs are made and priced, many pills cost the same regardless of the dosage. For instance, a one-month supply of the cholesterol drug Lipitor in 20-milligram pills for $99. A month's worth of 40-milligram pills sells for about $99. So a patient with a 20-milligram Lipitor prescription could buy a month of the higher-dose pills, cut them in half, and get two month's worth of Lipitor for the same price.
Numerous plastic pill-splitting devices have been developed to make the job easier and more precise. These pill-cutting devices range in price from about $3 for a simple drug-store version to $25 for one specially designed to easily split Viagra (an odd shaped pill designed so as to not to be easily cut in two).
UnitedHealth says the pill-splitting program was "extremely popular" when it was studied as a pilot test program among patients in Wisconsin, which is why the firm decided to launch it nationally. Half-a-pill "is as safe as any normal pharmaceutical," says spokesman Mark Lindsay. "The clinical evidence clearly shows that under a doctor's supervision you can do this and have the same clinical effect and save consumers and employers a lot of money."
Source: Health Journal by Tara Parker-Pope in The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2005
