Recent reports have demonstrated that brand-name medication prices are not increasing at the same rate as prior years. 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 for a visualization to shed some light on launch prices. This report introduces the latest visualization added to the 46brooklyn 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.

This summer, there was extensive media coverage on a large number of price increases on brand-name prescription drugs. However, when we examined CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) drug pricing data, we noticed that there were not many price increases at all. We had a hunch that the NADAC file must have been missing some of the price increases, so we dug into the data and discovered that it was missing prices on hundreds of drugs – many of which are specialty drugs. This report examines the limitations of our favorite publicly-available drug pricing benchmark, and how that benchmark can be improved to provide even better accountability to the drug supply chain.