Pharmacy Daily | $316m cost of codeine move

A NEW Guild-commissioned report into the impact of up-scheduling OTC codeine medicines has found additional GP visits will cost Medicare an extra $316 million every year. Undertaken by analysis firm Cadence Economics, the report “conservatively” estimated that 53% of patients would need to visit a GP to obtain scripts for products containing codeine. Currently there are 16.4 million purchases of OTC codeine-based analgesics annually and a further 5.2m purchases of OTC cold and flu medications containing codeine. Cadence estimated there would be 8.7 million additional GP visits - and that does not include the MBS cost of any increased GP visits by patients who are no longer able to access codeine containing cough and cold medications without a prescription. The company said there may also be an additional cost to the government in the form of increased PBS outlays as patients “up-scale” to higher dose medicines that require a PBS subsidy. And that’s not to mention the impact on patients in terms of inconvenience and time taken to visit the GP to obtain a prescription for a codeine-containing medicine, with Cadence citing a Macquarie Centre for the Health Economy study which found an additional $585 million in lost productivity costs per year. Cadence concluded that the govt should consider the net costs and benefits of the proposal to reclassify S3 codeine-based medicines, particularly due to the significant fiscal impact of increased GP visits and “obvious lower cost alternatives to addressing the health issue (such as instituting a register of OTC codeine medicines)”.

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