Employer Drug Benefit Plans and Spending on Prescription Drugs

Employer drug benefit plans and spending on prescription drugs.

CONTEXT With drug spending rising rapidly for working-aged adults, many employers and health insurance providers have changed benefits packages to encourage use of fewer or less expensive drugs. It is unknown how these initiatives affect drug costs. OBJECTIVE To examine how innovations in benefits packages, such as those that include multitier formularies and mandatory generic substitution, a...

Pharmacy benefit spending on oral chemotherapy drugs.

BACKGROUND Pharmacy benefits have historically excluded injectable drugs, resulting in coverage of injectable drugs under the medical benefit. High-cost biologics and other new drug therapies are often injectables and therefore have not presented cost threats to pharmacy benefits. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of capecitabine, an oral form of fluorouracil, in 1998, and imatinib...

A New Focus on Prescription Drug Spending.

Do Medicare Beneficiaries Living With HIV/AIDS Choose Prescription Drug Plans That Minimize Their Total Spending?

This article examines whether California Medicare beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS choose Part D prescription drug plans that minimize their expenses. Among beneficiaries without low-income supplementation, we estimate the excess cost, and the insurance policy and beneficiary characteristics responsible, when the lowest cost plan is not chosen. We use a cost calculator developed for this study, and ...

Kaiser Permanente's prescription drug benefit.