The LA Times reports that drugmakers “fought hard against California’s groundbreaking drug price transparency law, passed in 2017.” I’ll bet they did! So what have we learned?
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 the point at which half the prices are higher and half are lower.)
Naturally you’d like to see this in chart form:
As you can see, cheap generics saw the largest increase, more than doubling in cost. Everything else increased 20-30 percent. And if prices went up that much in California, it’s a safe bet they went up that much in your state too.
Why? Well, why not? It’s not as if anyone in power right now is going to stop them.
