Fiercer fight against sudden drug price hikes

Express Scripts plans to introduce several benefit programmes aimed at fighting high drug costs in the United States, including speeding up how quickly it moves insurer and employer customers to cheaper medicines after sudden price hikes.

Caroline Humer: Reuters, 28 April 2016

Last year, the sudden 5 000 percent price hike by Turing Pharmaceuticals for Daraprim, an anti-infective treatment for a rare disease, caught hospitals and patients by surprise and spurred investigations and hearings in Congress. Drug pricing has since become a national issue, taken up by Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. After that, Express Scripts and its next largest competitor CVS Health found cheaper alternatives for patients, but Express said the new programme will make it easier for customers to switch plans quickly. Express and CVS began several years ago trying to cut spending for customers by narrowing coverage choices and being tougher about patient authorisation.

This year, CVS also started a specific programme to try to limit patient use of expensive dermatology drugs. Express Scripts plans to expand a new pricing scheme in which it pays for cancer drugs based on how well studies show they work for a particular disease. It is looking at other therapeutic areas, such as arthritis and inflammatory diseases for 2017. Rheumatoid arthritis drugs like AbbVie's Humira, Amgen's Enbrel and Johnson & Johnson's Remicade are among the top selling drugs in this category and have had large price increases over the years. Another therapeutic area Express Scripts is watching closely is dermatitis, with two new highly-effective drugs potentially hitting the market this year. It is also working on diabetes, where it is expecting cheaper treatments to hit the market by the end of the year.