Opinion: Insulin prices and pharmacy benefit manager rebates: pin the tail on the patient
Over the past 15 years, insulin prices have more than doubled. Pharmaceutical companies have been on the receiving end of most of the blame, and the chorus of angry voices has grown louder given Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. 3 bill, which shows that Americans pay three times more for the same medicines than Europeans do.
My firm, Vital Transformation, has been at the center of both the H.R. 3 debate in Congress and the International Pricing Initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services. For the last several months, we’ve been looking closely at the costs charged under Medicare Parts B and D. The strangest data we saw was related to insulin spending by Medicare Part D.
