Drug super spender tsunami: An integrated medical and pharmacy benefits assessment.

BACKGROUND: As new rare-disease drug therapy, gene therapies, and high-priced cancer drugs receive US Food and Drug Administration approval, there is an increasing potential for drug super spender individuals with more than $250,000 annual drug cost. OBJECTIVE: To categorize all members in a large, commercially insured population by their total annual combined drug costs from both medical and pharmacy benefits and to determine the trend in drug super spender prevalence. METHODS: Using a commercially insured population with integrated medical and pharmacy benefits, all unique members with any enrollment between January 2016 and December 2019 were identified. The sum of total cost for all pharmacy claims plus all medical benefit claim lines for drugs was determined for each member, for each calendar year. Cost was defined as the plan plus member liability at network-discounted price, with no further adjustment for any coupons or rebates. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the drug super spender growth. RESULTS: There was an average of 17.9 million members per year with at least 1 month of eligibility through the 4-year study period. In 2016, a total of 2,994 members with more than $250,000 drug cost per member accounted for $1,324 million drug spend. In 2019, there were 5,894 super spender members (97% increase), accounting for $2,579 million drug cost (95% increase), which was 9.6% of $26,618 million total drug spend. CONCLUSIONS: In this large, commercially insured population, a small (32 per 100,000) number of drug super spender members comprise a disproportionate portion of the total drug expenditures, at $1 of every $10 dollars of total drug expenditures. Health plans need to understand the drug super spender trend and develop strategies to maintain health care affordability. DISCLOSURES: This study was funded internally by Prime Therapeutics LLC. Drs Starner and Gleason are employees of Prime Therapeutics LLC, a pharmacy benefits management company. Dr Bowen is a former employee of Prime Therapeutics LLC.

Specialty drug coupons lower out-of-pocket costs and may improve adherence at the risk of increasing premiums.

Expenditures for specialty drugs account for more than 25 percent of total US drug spending and have been increasing at more than 13 percent annually. We examined insurers' role in maintaining the affordability and accessibility of specialty drugs while maximizing their value. We conducted two analyses: one using an administrative claims database with information on more than ten million commercially insured patients and another using the same database combined with the drug prescription records from a specialty pharmacy. First, we examined the prevalence of specialty drug coupons and the degree to which these reduced patients' out-of-pocket costs, focusing on 264,801 prescriptions. Second, we quantified the association between the magnitude of out-of-pocket costs for specialty drugs and patients' abandonment of their new or restarted therapy, focusing on a group of nearly 16,000 patients. We found that drug coupons accounted for $21.2 million of patients' $35.3 million annual out-of-pocket costs. In the vast majority of cases, coupons reduced monthly cost sharing to less than $250, a point at which patients were far less likely to abandon therapy with biologic anti-inflammatory drugs or with drugs for multiple sclerosis. However, by reducing cost sharing, coupons may also circumvent efforts to encourage patients to use the most cost-effective drugs.