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A Caveated Boost For Me-Toos And PBMs In New Net Price Competition Study

 
• By Sarah Karlin-Smith

PBMs are able to leverage brand-to-brand competition across a variety of drug classes to lower costs, but that achievement and the presence of me-too drugs is more complicated than what might on its surface look like a clear win for the US health system.

two people in business clothes engaging in a tug of war
Head-to-head brand competition can lead to savings, new study shows. • Source: Shutterstock

A new study that shows the impact brand-to-brand drug competition can have on net prices could be used by pharmaceutical companies to showcase the value of “me-too” drugs and also by pharmacy benefits managers, who have been the drug pricing punching bag as of late, to showcase their role in lowering medication costs in the US.

Key Takeaways
  • Evidence that PBMs can keep net prices of drugs in check doesn’t alleviate the need for PBM reform, experts say.
  • Even with realized savings, “me-too” drugs...

But any such positive gain from the results is likely small. For drug manufacturers, it’s not clear how generalizable the brand-to-brand competition is beyond the dozen drug pairs examined by...

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