TV DRUG ADS RAISE CONSUMER INTEREST, COSTS

WASHINGTON - When the Food and Drug Administration decided in 1997 to let
prescription drug companies use television to advertise directly to
consumers, it unleashed a surge in demand. Patients are requesting
expensive brand-name drugs more often and doctors are willingly - if not
always happily - prescribing them.

The upside is that many patients are being treated with the most up-to-date
medications for conditions - such as high cholesterol - that they might not
have known they had if an advertisement had not led them to a doctor's office.

But the trend has a price. Americans spent $100 billion for prescription
drugs in 1998, an 84 percent increase in five years. Two reinforcing trends
are driving this worrisome component of medical inflation, and television
advertising is contributing to both.

- - The average price of a prescription climbed 40 percent, to $37.38, during
the past five years, propelled in part by the cost of advertising. Overall
consumer inflation during that period was only about 15 percent.

- - Americans are consuming more medication. New and better drugs are being
brought to market at a record pace, thanks to accelerated development by
the drug companies and a fast-track approval system by government
regulators. And advertising has encouraged consumers to buy them.

Beset by rising costs, health maintenance organizations, insurers and
employers are passing the higher prices off to the public. Consumers with
insurance might pay $20 toward each prescription instead of $10, and the
consumers' payments might go even higher for drugs not on their health
plans' lists of approved medications.

"If current trends continue, this growing inflation (in drugs) will soon
overtake the cost of all other health benefits," according to a recent
report prepared for the Blue Cross-Blue Shield Association, whose member
health plans cover 67 million Americans. "Paying for these services will
pose a major threat to U.S. employers' global competitiveness."