New Kaiser analy­sis shows how lim­it­ing price ne­go­ti­a­tions to tar­get­ed drugs may bet­ter fo­cus up­com­ing leg­is­la­tion

As Con­gress con­sid­ers whether to adopt sweep­ing new leg­is­la­tion to low­er pre­scrip­tion drug prices across the board, the Kaiser Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion is out with a new re­port on Mon­day show­ing how a more tar­get­ed ap­proach on a sub­set of drugs might be a more ef­fi­cient way to save gov­ern­ment funds.

“This analy­sis shows that Medicare Part D and Part B spend­ing is high­ly con­cen­trat­ed among a rel­a­tive­ly small share of cov­ered drugs, main­ly those with­out gener­ic or biosim­i­lar com­peti­tors,” wrote Juli­ette Cuban­s­ki, deputy di­rec­tor of the pro­gram on Medicare pol­i­cy at KFF, and Tri­cia Neu­man, SVP of KFF. “Fo­cus­ing drug price ne­go­ti­a­tion or ref­er­ence pric­ing on a sub­set of drugs that ac­count for a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of spend­ing would be an ef­fi­cient use of ad­min­is­tra­tive re­sources, though it would al­so leave some po­ten­tial sav­ings on the ta­ble.”

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