‘Kids need to breathe just like adults do:’ $35 price caps don’t apply to asthma meds young children need, doctors say

Some makers of asthma inhalers pledged to cap out-of-pocket costs for some US patients at $35. But those pledges don’t apply to daily inhalers used by the youngest kids,

Kerry Pearl remembers the pharmacist holding up the medicine her 4-year-old son needed to help him breathe. “He was literally holding it, looking at me like: ‘I can’t give you this,’ ” she recalls. “My poor kid is at home not sleeping through the night and waking up coughing, and you’re holding the answer and the insurance company kind of holds the keys here.” It was the asthma drug fluticasone, whose brand name is Flovent. It’s used daily by the youngest children with asthma as a preventive medicine so their airways don’t get so swollen that a trigger — a virus, cold air, pollen — could cause an asthma attack. As a toddler, before Pearl’s son started it, she said he would cough all night and sometimes gasp for breath when he talked. With the medicine, she said, his asthma was finally under control. But the maker of Flovent, British drug giant GSK, removed the branded drug from the US market in January, and its replacement — an authorized generic form identical in all but branding — doesn’t have the same insurance coverage. It costs hundreds of dollars a month without it. The move has left families like Pearl’s scrambling. Asthma drugs can be pricy across the board, so much so that the Senate health committee, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, opened an investigation into the situation in January.