Medicare just released a huge swath of data detailing 2013 prescription drug usage in its Part D program. The data, coming from more than 1 million health care providers, accounts for more than $103 billion in drug costs. It’s reportedly the most detailed list of drug costs the government behemoth’s ever released.
The broadly released data can be mined by the general public – for the first time ever – so as to improve transparency of drug costs.
“We know that there are many, many smart minds in this country,” Sean Cavanaugh, a deputy administrator at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a conference call. “We are excited to unleash those minds and see what they can find in our data.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The top ten drugs, by costs, are as follows:
But here the top ten are by utilization. They’re all generics:
It’s interesting to draw conclusions about the Medicare Part D populace based on the drug prevalence and costs. Most everything centers around heart disease, pain, diabetes and heartburn – the standard public health concerns that are so very preventable with diet and exercise.
For instance, lisinopril and simvastatin treat cardiovascular indications like hypertension and high cholesterol; levothyroxine sodium regulates the thyroid. After that come painkillers, GERD treatments and diabetes drugs. The list that shows the most money spent on specific branded meds follow the same trends – Nexium targets heartburn, Crestor’s for cholesterol, Januvia is meant for diabetes – though psych meds like Abilify and Cymbalta do notably make the list.
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Medicare also charted the prescriber specialties that had the highest cost of prescriptions:
Given the indications in the first two charts, it comes as little surprise that the bulk of costs come from internal medicine and family practice – though the cost per drug is costlier in neurology and psychiatry.
