VIRGINIA FIRST IN HELP WITH KIDS' VACCINES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 10, 1993                   TAG: 9303100243
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
VIRGINIA FIRST IN HELP WITH KIDS' VACCINES
Virginia is the first state to take part in a proposed national partnership between doctors and a drug manufacturer that supporters say will make children's vaccines cheaper and easier to obtain.
Under a program begun last week, Merck & Co. distributed free doses of a vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella to 1,800 Virginia pediatricians and family doctors. Only doctors who treat Medicaid patients are eligible.
The program is designed to make the vaccines more widely available to low-income families by making it worthwhile for more local doctors' offices to treat Medicaid patients.
Merck will be reimbursed by the state after doctors submit paperwork to the Virginia Medicaid office. Doctors are paid a $2 handling fee per shot.
The program reverses the standard distribution system, where doctors ordered their own supply of the vaccine at a list price of $25.29 a dose and then billed Medicaid for the cost of the shot and the office visit.
Under the program, Virginia gets the Merck vaccine at about half price. Rahway, N.J.-based Merck is the vaccine's only maker.
The program could save Virginia $800,000 annually, said Bruce Kozlowski, director of the state's Medical Assistance Services Department.
Merck benefits from the program because more of its vaccine gets on the market, said company spokeswoman Pamela Adkins.
About 63 percent of children's doctors in Virginia accept patients covered under Medicaid, the joint federal-state program that provides health insurance to low-income people. However, most refuse to vaccinate Medicaid babies due to cost and paperwork burdens.
As a result, parents have had to pay inoculation costs themselves or take their children for free shots offered at public clinics, where waits can be long or hours inconvenient.
More than half of all children in the United States aren't getting their shots when they need them, before the age of 2, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
President Clinton visited a clinic in Arlington last month to decry the nation's low immunization rate. Clinton blamed high vaccine prices and the limited availability of less expensive options such as public clinics.
"I think it is very much the mirror image of what the president is talking about," Kozlowski said of the new Merck partnership.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB