Despite a slowdown in brand-name drug list prices, the gross-to-net bubble is alive and well. The bubble reflects the growing spread between a manufacturer’s list price for a drug and the net price to a third-party payer after rebates.
According to the most recent QuintilesIMS report, the total value of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ off-invoice discounts, rebates, and other price concessions has more than doubled over the past five years, from $59 billion 2012 to an astonishing $127 billion in 2016.
Those payments offset more than half of the increase in list-price based spending. And though the gap between invoice and net prices shrank in 2016, the value of manufacturers’ discounts and rebates payments still grew last year, by $11 billion.
Below I delve into these data and share my observations. Tomorrow, I’ll examine how the bubble affects patients’ out-of-pocket costs and how CVS Health’s PBM business hopes to survive when the bubble pops.
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