How much was that latest NADAC survey update worth?
Each week CMS posts updates to its National Average Drug Acquisition Price (NADAC) database. It quietly happens each Tuesday, without much fanfare. If you check this weekly, you likely have noticed that most weeks, not much changes. Maybe there were a few calls into the CMS help desk that triggered a price update, or a random wholesale acquisition cost (WAC) update on a brand name drug. But there is one week each month (normally either the 3rd or 4th week) where there is a lot of pricing action, almost exclusively within generic drugs. We call this “survey results week,” the week when CMS publishes changes to thousands of NDCs based on the survey results from prior month invoice costs reported by pharmacies all across the country.
When you dig into the changes you'll find thousands of generic prices went up or down. It left us wondering, what's the aggregate impact of all of these changes? That question led to this visualization, which aims to assess the aggregate impact of all of the generic drug price changes using Medicaid's overall drug mix. Hopefully this adds some much needed context to this critical monthly update.
Data Sources
Most recent CMS NADAC Comparison Database
How we Created our Dataset
Join State Utilization Drug Use Database (SDUD) and National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) data tables
Filter database down to tablets and capsules only (to avoid unit mismatches)
Multiply absolute change in NADAC by Medicaid units dispensed to get quarterly impact. Then multiply by four to annualize impact.
How to Use
Each bubble represents a different NDC Description (i.e. generic drug name)
The color of the bubble corresponds to the % change in the most recent survey
The size of the bubble corresponds to the annualized Medicaid impact
Click on a bubble in the charts below to view specific data about that drug group, including historic price trends where available.
The visualization defaults to "All" states, but you can choose individual states as well
*By default the most recent data for all states is chosen, and the charts are limited to the most extreme cases. Please change any of the options below to get the experience that’s right for you.
What does the average impact of these price changes look like over time?
Some Insights About This Data:
Since ${first_year} the national average drug acquisition costs that Medicaid is based on have experienced huge shifts in price over time. Medicaid has seen the financial value of its drugs increase to the tune of ${total_increase_currency}. Conversely, it has also seen ${substantial_modest} drug price decreases totaling ${total_decrease_currency}.
To date ${bigger_increase_percentage}% of all underlying price increases has come from ${bigger_increases_from} drugs. That can be broken down into Managed Care (MCO) and Fee for Service (FFS) spending as can be seen in the charts below.
From these charts you can see that ${bigger_increase_utilization_string} are responsible for the greatest share of drug price increases, ${utiliziation_type_conjunction} the greatest drug price decreases.
While the above charts speak to the underlying influences to the ever changing costs of Medicaid, we'd like to compare that to the actual documented amount of Medicaid spending in the chart below. Take note that ${largest_actual_impact_type} have had the largest impact on the costs of Medicaid, accounting for ${largest_actual_impact_string} with a ${largest_actual_impact_margin} margin
Impact to Medicaid
Like what you see?
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v 3.02 - posted February 23, 2022
For full release notes click here