Drug prices are higher in the United States than any other country---Big pharma companies are the cause.
Mulcahy 2/1 [Andrew W.; He is a senior health economist at RAND. His key research areas are prescription drugs, payment for health care services and drugs, and policy evaluation in general; 2/1/2024; RAND; “Prescription Drug Prices in the U.S. Are 2.78 Times Those in Other Countries”; https://www.rand.org/news/press/2024/02/01.html]//kaviWaRu
Prescription drug prices in the United States are significantly higher than in other nations, with prices in the United States averaging 2.78 times those seen in 33 other nations, according to a new RAND report.
The gap between prices in the United States and other countries is even larger for brand-named drugs, with U.S. prices averaging 4.22 times those in comparison nations.
The RAND study found that prices for unbranded generic drugs—which account for 90 percent of prescription volume in the United States—are about 67 percent of the average cost in the comparison nations.
The new report updates findings from earlier RAND analysis about U.S. drug prices. That analysis compared 2018 manufacturer gross drug prices in the United States with other nations using a price index approach.
The new report uses updated information through 2022. It also includes additional analysis that focuses on price comparisons for biosimilars and changes in price comparison results over time.
“These findings provide further evidence that manufacturers' gross prices for prescription drugs are higher in the United States than in comparison countries,” said Andrew Mulcahy, lead author of the study and a senior health economist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “We find that the gap is widening for name-brand drugs, while U.S. prices for generic drugs are now proportionally lower than our earlier analysis found.”
The RAND analysis provides the most up-to-date estimates of how much higher drug prices are in the United States compared to other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Researchers calculated price indexes under a wide range of methodological decisions. While some sensitivity analyses lowered the differences between U.S. prices compared to those in other nations, under all the scenarios examined overall prescription drug prices remained substantially higher in the United States.
The analysis used manufacturer gross prices for drugs because net prices—the amounts ultimately retained by manufacturers after negotiated rebates and other discounts are applied—are not systematically available. Even after adjusting U.S. prices downward to account for these discounts, U.S. prices for brand name drugs remained more than three times higher than those in other countries.