What happens when Rx price bubbles (such as on insulin) burst?

In the first half of 2023, Americans witnessed evidence of a rather fundamental shift in the manner pharma had traditionally opted to commercialize selected prescription drugs. Specifically, in March 2023,Lilly,Novo Nordisk andSanofi each announced they planned to slash insulin list prices for insulin. To do so, they would disintermediate PBMs from the transaction and " opt out " of the PBM commercialization channel.The decision wasn ' t really all that difficult; for years branded insulin-makers had been complaining that PBMs and other drug distribution system entities had been gobbling up an ever-larger share of their revenues, while at the same time, patient complaints grew louder and more frequent that they were not realizing any of the benefits of the all thar behind-the-scenes discounting. Something was broken. In March 2020, Sanofi headlined a section of theWall Street Journal when it complained that its realized " net " prices on Lantus had been falling steadily, and then academic researchers at University of Southern California proved it wasn ' t just Sanofi who was experiencing that, rather all of them were experiencing the exact same problemhttps://news.usc.edu/194289/insulin-costs/ with middlemen grabbing over half of all the revenues.Yet the biggest vertically-integrated (with commercial healthcare insurance companies, specifically United Healthcare ' s OptumRx, CVS/Caremark/Aetna and Cigna ' s Express Scripts) PBMs actually threatened Lilly, Novo Nordisk and San...
Source: Scott's Web Log - Category: Endocrinology Tags: 2023 Source Type: blogs