New dashboard shows wild drug pricing variability in Medicare Part D

It’s the middle of July. A time of year for pool parties, barbecues, campfires. and generally sweating your butt off. It’s a relaxing time of year for the majority of us. But what about the ski bums out there? It’s a long six months (five if you are lucky) until the first big dump of the year. At 46brooklyn, we sympathize with impatiently waiting for things – except rather than waiting to shred the gnar, we’ve been anxiously waiting to shred through Medicare Part D drug pricing data. Good news, drug pricing enthusiasts; we have a big (data) dump for you! After months of work on our newest drug pricing tool, we are pleased to release the Medicare Part D Drug Pricing Ski Slope dashboard. In this viz, we give you the ability to select one of many drugs (brand and generic, oral solid and non-oral solid), and view the price set by thousands of Part D plans for your selected drug. For good measure, we added a line to show you the true market-based cost of the drug (based on NADAC), so you can see how frustratingly random Part D pricing is by different plans for the same drug.

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Ben Link
46brooklyn releases "Do-It-Yourself" tutorial to facilitate crowd-sourcing of drug pricing research

Do you like to tinker with data? Do you broadly distrust anything you have not created yourself? Are you tired of the drug supply chain funding their own studies telling you how wonderful they are, without telling you exactly how they calculated their wonderfulness? Well, you’re in luck. 46brooklyn has released our first video that will teach you how to construct our wildly-popular Medicaid Drug Pricing Heat Map from scratch. Our hope is that this will inspire you to create your own tools to help answer your drug pricing questions, with the conviction that can only come from “building the house” with your own two hands!

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Ben LinkVideo
What’s happening to generic drug prices? June 2019 NADAC Survey Update

It’s NADAC survey results week, which means it’s time for our next installment of “what happened to generic drug prices last month.” It looks like we saw a lot of price increases this past month, and an overall increase in annualized spending. As always, the details matter, and we’re here to provide them for you. Check out our latest drug pricing report for a lot of important updates, plus an updated NADAC Packed Bubble Chart and new year-over-year generic deflation tracker!

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Ben LinkNADAC, Medicaid, Generic
What’s happening to generic drug prices? May 2019 NADAC Survey Update

It’s NADAC survey results week, which means it’s time for our next installment of “what happened to generic drug prices last month.” It looks like we saw a lot of price increases this past month, and an overall increase in annualized spending. As always, the details matter, and we’re here to provide them for you. Check out our latest drug pricing report for a lot of important updates, plus an updated and upgraded NADAC Packed Bubble Chart!

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Newly released CMS drug pricing data reveals continued generic drug pricing distortions

Last week, we were met with a delightful surprise as we were perusing through the CMS website and discovered an out-of-the-blue drug pricing data update just begging to be downloaded. The hidden treasure was the freshly-updated CMS State Utilization database, which provides quarterly drug pricing data that shows what state Medicaid programs are spending on prescription drugs, providing an excellent window into the price-setting practices of the prescription drug supply chain. This most recent CMS data update ended up filling in most of the Q3 2018 divots and extended the 2018 data to include large portions of the fourth quarter. We have updated all of our dashboards that rely on this dataset, rolling all of them forward to Q4 2018. We couldn't resist sneaking an extended peak at the data, and while we will offer more in-depth analyses soon, we wanted to give some of our initial takeaways.

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What’s happening to generic drug prices? April 2019 NADAC Survey Update

It’s NADAC survey results week, which means it’s time for our next installment of “what happened to generic drug prices last month.” It looks like we saw a lot of price decreases this past month, and and overall decrease in annualized spending. As always, the details matter, and we’re here to provide them for you. Check out our latest drug pricing report for a lot of important updates, plus an updated and upgraded NADAC Packed Bubble Chart!

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New Ohio drug pricing data from shows where PBMs and pharmacies make their money

For the first time in our existence, CMS has released drug pricing data that overlaps with the date of our launch. As we ripped open the data and examined CMS’ gift, we found some major changes in the way that the state of Ohio reported their data – and it has revealed some eye-opening information about PBM and pharmacy margins on prescription drugs. Given all the drug pricing noise out of Ohio, and the federal heat on PBM “spread pricing,” we decided to do a deep dive into what’s happening in Ohio, and how its new data provides incredible clues to determine where the money flows within the drug supply chain.

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Ben Link
New CMS Medicaid drug pricing data released with stunning findings

Recently, CMS updated their State Utilization databases, which provides quarterly drug pricing data that shows what state Medicaid programs are spending on prescription drugs. While Medicaid is only one (large) component of prescription drug spending, its importance is less based upon its size than it is the amazing amount of transparency in the program, relative to other segments of the market. This most recent CMS data update ended up filling in most of the Q2 2018 potholes and extended the 2018 data to include large portions of the third quarter. We have updated all of our dashboards that rely on this dataset, rolling all of them forward to Q3 2018, and there are some stunning takeaways.

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Ben Link
What’s happening to generic drug prices? March 2019 NADAC Survey Update

It’s NADAC survey results week, which means it’s time for our next installment of “what happened to generic drug prices last month.” It looks like we saw a lot of price increases this past month, but overall decrease in annualized spending. As always, the details matter, and we’re here to provide them for you. Check out our latest drug pricing report for a lot of important updates, plus an updated and upgraded NADAC Packed Bubble Chart!

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