California’s New Transparency Law Reveals Steep Rise In Wholesale Drug Prices

(By Barbara Feder Ostrov and Harriet Blair Rowan for CaliforniaHealthline)

Drugmakers fought hard against California’s groundbreaking drug price transparency law, passed in 2017. Now, state health officials have released their first report on the price hikes those drug companies sought to shield.

Pharmaceutical companies raised the “wholesale acquisition cost” of their drugs — the list price for wholesalers without discounts or rebates — by a median of 25.8% from 2017 through the first quarter of 2019, according to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. (The median is a value at the midpoint of data distribution.)

Generic drugs saw the largest median increase of 37.6% during that time. By comparison, the annual inflation rate during the period was 2%.  Continue reading article here…

California Healthline is a service of the California Health Care Foundation produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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