New dashboard released to uncover growing trend of high prescription drug launch prices

Recent reports have demonstrated that brand-name medication prices are not increasing at the same rate as prior years. We’ve highlighted similar trends in our digging as well.

While slowing list price increases can be helpful, and certainly understandable given the amount of coverage drug prices have gotten over the previous year, it misses one of the key points within the brand drug marketplace. Brand-name drug cost pressures have less and less to do with year-over-year price increases and more to do with the launch prices of new brand name medications when they initially come to market.

So naturally, we saw an opportunity to begin researching what's happening with prescription drug launch prices, and what we found was yet another disturbing trend that's been hidden under surface-level conversations about drug pricing.

Our latest report introduces the newest data visualization added to our drug pricing toolkit: the 46brooklyn Drug Pricing Launchpad.

Spoiler alert: Brand-name drug launch prices are rising aggressively.

This is a problem for sure, but why it's a problem may surprise you.

This report will take you on a journey through the lifecycle of a drug, and illustrate how high, pre-rebate list prices on brand-name drugs today become a profit opportunity for the supply chain off generic drugs in the future.

In this latest report, you'll see that we have beefed up our data weaponry to provide you with even better insights than before. But we have also added some new expertise into the fold. Get to know 46brooklyn's newest team member, Ben Link.

Ben already came up huge this week, working tirelessly to construct our new Drug Pricing Launchpad.

We look forward to offering better dashboards, better insights, and ultimately, a better overall product with these new resources aboard. Please continue to to support our efforts.


Thanks to Bob Herman at Axios who spent time poking and prodding our new Launchpad dashboard this week. Bob summarized weeks worth of work into around 300 words, giving us a great lesson in the value of brevity and giving our spouses better arguments when they ask us to finally close our laptops.

Ben Link