09 de juny 2017

The farce of confidential drug prices (2)

Payers’ experiences with confidential pharmaceutical price discounts: A survey of public and statutory health systems inNorth America, Europe, and Australasia

Some months  ago I posted on confidential drug pricing. I said that this was the end of cost-effectiveness as we have known. Now a new article reflects the evidence of my words:
Confidential price discounts are now common among the ten health systems that participated in our study, though some had only recently begun to use these pricing arrangements on a routine basis. Several health systems had used a wide variety of discounting schemes in the past two years. The most frequent discount received by participating health systems was between 20% and 29% of official list prices; however, six participants reported their health system received one or more discount over the past two years that was valued at 60% or more of the list prices. On average, participants reported that confidential discounts were more common, complex, and significant for specialty pharmaceuticals than for primary care pharmaceuticals.
If confidential discounts are huge (>60%), as they are, any cost-effectiveness analysis is adhoc and its obsolescence undermines any result. This fact is the recognition that the pricing system is not working and we are under a procurement system. As I said some months ago:The time to finish such farce has come.