ICYMI: STUDY FINDS MEDICARE PART B WOULD HAVE SAVED $3.7 BILLION OVER THREE YEARS IF BIG PHARMA’S PRICE HIKES WERE BELOW THE RATE OF INFLATION

Analysis Finds Drug Companies Increased Prices Faster Than the Rate of Inflation on 70 of the 93 Best-Selling Part B Prescription Drugs

In case you missed it, researchers affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard University published an analysis in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which found that the Medicare Part B program would have saved $3.7 billion on prescription drug spending between 2018 and 2020 had solutions designed to keep Big Pharma’s price hikes below the rate of inflation passed into law as part of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) been in place during that time frame.

The study found that Big Pharma hiked prices faster than the rate of inflation on 70 of the 93 best-selling drugs in Medicare Part B between 2018 and 2020. The savings would have amounted to nearly three percent of the program’s total spending on prescription drugs over these years.

“The takeaway is that Medicare has historically spent a lot of money each year because drug companies raise prices,” one of the study’s co-authors, Benjamin Rome, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told STAT News.

Read the full analysis in The Journal of the American Medical Association HERE.

Learn more about how Big Pharma’s price hikes have long outpaced the rate of inflation HERE.

Learn about how Big Pharma’s unjustified price hikes on just seven drugs cost the U.S. $805 million in 2021 HERE.

Learn more about market-based solutions to hold Big Pharma accountable and lower prescription drug prices HERE.