Specialty drug per employee cost trend refers to the change in specialty drug spend per employee from 2017 to 2018 for each company in our database. While the average increase of 11% is right in line with benchmarks, the year-to-year price movement for each company is all over the board. Only 15% of the groups in our database had a trend rate between 10% and 15%. (more…)
The prescription drug market is officially upside down. We were recently looking at a large coalition’s new initiative to “remove unnecessary drugs” from its formulary. The plan, believe it or not, is to charge coalition members over $3 million in fees to exclude these expensive, unnecessary drugs.
Our response: Really? We have to pay them extra for that? Why were those drugs covered in the first place? Weren’t we already paying them to help us avoid spending money on expensive, unnecessary drugs? (more…)
We just received another invitation to take advantage of an insurance company’s “supplemental compensation program.” Every time we see these solicitations, we feel our blood pressure rise. It certainly reinforces the practice of insurance companies referring to brokers as their “producers.” (more…)