CVS And Cigna Charge $6,000 For $55 Generics

by Tyler Durden

Thursday, Sep 14, 2023 – 10:20 AM

By Mish Shedlock of Mishtalk

Health insurers dramatically mark up prices of generics and pharmacies are in on the scheme.

Generic Drugs Should Be Cheap But Sometimes They Aren’t

The Wall Street Journal reports Generic Drugs Should Be Cheap, but Insurers Are Charging Thousands of Dollars for Them

The cancer drug Gleevec went generic in 2016 and can be bought today for as little as $55 a month. But many patients’ insurance plans are paying more than 100 times that.

CVS Health and Cigna can charge $6,600 a month or more for Gleevec prescriptions, a Wall Street Journal analysis of pricing data found. They are able to do that because they set the prices with pharmacies, which they sometimes own.

Across a selection of these so-called specialty generic drugs, Cigna and CVS’s prices were at least 24 times higher on average than roughly what the medicines’ manufacturers charge, the Journal found.

The prices at UnitedHealth Group, which also owns a large health insurer, were 3.5 times as much, according to the analysis of data compiled by 46brooklyn Research, a nonprofit drug-pricing analytics group.

Price Gap

• Cigna’s prices were 27.4 times higher than Cuban’s on average for 19 generic drugs.
• CVS’s prices were 24.2 times higher on average for 17 generic drugs.
• UnitedHealth’s prices were 3.5 times higher than Cuban’s on average for 19 generic drugs.
• Cigna can charge roughly $6,610 a month for Gleevec, the Journal’s analysis found. CVS Health can charge more than $7,000 a month. United Health can charge $218. 
• A prescription for generic Tecfidera, a multiple-sclerosis therapy, costs $54 a month through the Cuban pharmacy, compared with nearly $1,215 through UnitedHealth. (Cigna and CVS didn’t submit prices for the drug to Medicare.)
• A monthly prescription for prostate-cancer drug Zytiga costs about $118 on Cuban’s website, compared with $4,195 through Cigna, $2,056 through CVS and $205 through UnitedHealth.

Kudos to Mark Cuban for Increasing Competition

On August 22, I wrote Kudos to Mark Cuban for Lower Priced Drugs and Increasing Health Care Competition

Big Win For Consumers

Fortune called it a big win for Cuban. I suggest it’s a big win for everyone.

It also strikes at the heart of precisely what is wrong with Medicare for all and single payer setups. When government picks up the entire tab, there is no incentive for consumers to shop around for better deals.

Those without health care coverage and those on high deductible plans are the biggest winners.

Some of the savings on CostPlus are amazing.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/cvs-and-cigna-charge-6000-55-generics