Moral Hazards in Drug Sector and its Financial Burden on Health Insurance Organizations (an Economic Approach to Medical Ethics)

Unethical behavior in the health sector entitledas widespread moral hazardandhave high share in the health system’s growing costs in the world. Presentstudy aimed to analyze the moral hazards of distribution medicines in pharmacies and the financial burden on insurance organizations.

Present cross sectionalstudywith reviewing the prescriptions provided to the two maingovernmental and private pharmaciesand usingindividual's disease information, moral hazards categorized in three separate branches. First category was the irrational prescribing the medication, second, the rate of drugs that are exposed to expire period and third category was tear off a leaf from the insurance booklets and writing some formal medications. Then with analyze the data, assessing the financial burden of moral hazards on medical insurance organizationswasconducted.

Irrational prescriptions had the mostprevalencebetween the observed moral hazardsandwere more frequented in public pharmacy. Irrational prescriptions cost was significantly higher in general physicians prescriptions than specialists. Also cost of moral hazards in public pharmacy was significantly higher than private one. The additional financial burden on insurance organizations was estimated 120 million Rialsin a month. Ethical Considerations: Gathered data was usedwith considering confidentiality and informed consent was taken from participants.

Financial burden assessment of moral hazards addition to confirming the importance of ethics in health systems and among health service providers in medicine section, represent the probability of control a large part of the health care system costs by promoting ethics.