On December 19, 2019, CMS released its highly-anticipated 2018 Medicare Part D spending data. Besides a few tweets and one article on the release, this very material event (at least for drug pricing nerds) apparently got lost in the year-end, impeachment-spiked, eggnog-soaked holiday daze. We stumbled upon this data in early January and immediately set out to study it and tell its story, and boy, there's a lot of story to tell.
Read MoreThe start of each new year brings a lot of “new-ness,” including a new round of price increases on brand-name drugs. This year has been no exception, and the media has been all over the subject. Unfortunately, we’ve found it difficult to figure out the “so what?” behind all of these price increases. On one hand, we are being told that the pharmaceutical manufacturers are back to “business as usual,” while on the other we are being told that the number of price increases are down meaningfully from last year. Which one is it? This felt like an opportunity to inject a healthy dose of facts into this discussion. So we set out to build a dashboard, 46brooklyn’s Brand Drug Price Change Box Score, that lets you visualize all brand-name manufacturer list price changes that are publicly-reported each week, drill down to the manufacturer and drug level, strength level, and compare and contrast different periods.
Read MoreIf you’re trying to discover reasons for why drug prices go up or down, one of the best things to look at is supply and demand. A new federal antitrust lawsuit alleges that several generic drugmakers were colluding in an effort to protect market share and raise prices. To get a better sense of what was happening in the market at the time the alleged collusion took place, it helps to track a drug’s market share over time. Using Medicaid utilization data and other public datasets, we have now launched a new dashboard to provide a crumb trail for those looking to determine the market distribution of drug manufacturers as prices fluctuate.
Read MoreAfter Bloomberg put drug price markups on the map, we decided a deeper dive into markups was warranted to see which drugs were getting overinflated and which drugs were not. To sort things out, we built a new visualization dashboard to compare drug markups between state Medicaid programs. We call our creation the “Medicaid Markup Universe.” In this new visualization tool, we found a disturbingly large difference in drug markups across generic drugs in state Medicaid managed care programs, resulting in a slew of warped incentives that pressure supply chain members to value certain medications over others, and thus, certain patients over others. Check out our newest visualization tool and read our latest drug pricing report.
We are pleased to announce a new visualization tool that shows what prescription drugs that state Medicaid programs are purchasing. This new 46brooklyn State Utilization Dashboard will now provide an easy way to see the degree with which each prescription drug is being dispensed to Medicaid patients on a state-by-state basis. This new dashboard will show unprecedented levels of detail in what state Medicaid programs are paying for. As taxpayers, we believe you deserve to know what you bought, and to also see how much you spent. There are a myriad of ways this new tool can be used, so hopefully you can use it to answer every question you ever (or never) had.
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