Prescription Drug Access and Treatment

Prescription Drugs are playing a big role in modern medicine treatments all over the world, as the new medications are replacing invasive surgery, improving patient's health and providing a faster recovery, but these treatments unfortunately are not affordable for everyone. The new prescription drugs are usually incredibly expensive and the people with a great need of these medicines like elderly and handicap population are often not covered by their insurances for that kind of treatments.

The well known program “Medicare” often does not cover the outpatient's treatments which forces the regular population to buy themselves the medications. Since 1965 the coverage of prescription drugs has become a standard feature of the private insurance, and it has become clear that the omission of outpatient drug coverage represents a crucial gap in protection for the most vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries.

Former President Bill Clinton proposed in 1999 a plan to improve a Medicare prescription drug coverage program to grant access to every American to all innovative drug treatments, but unfortunately the plan was less successful than expected. In response to this situation, a different alternative was used by the American population to get their safemeds. The implementation of online pharmacies (for example XLpharmacy) was a great opportunity for people with regular incomes to buy a generic version of their medications for a much cheaper price.

Nowadays the controversy about this topic remains as there isn't a definitive solution for this, although a re-modernization of the Clinton plan was implemented again on Medicare in 2006, providing all 49 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries access to the Medicare drug benefit through private plans approved by the federal government. Medicare replaced Medicaid and beneficiaries with low incomes and modest assets were eligible for assistance with cost sharing of prescription drugs. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 made some important changes to the program's “Part D” in particular, and plans to phase out the coverage gap by 2020.