The cost of prescription drugs is one of the most significant challenges when it comes to affordability of medication for American families. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report, investing in innovation is one of the most important steps in medical care, as it paves the way to better treatments to diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's.
Additionally, improvements on the level of understanding of these diseases could lead to creating proper medication in order to ameliorate, if not fully treat these conditions.
Aside from being varied, thus addressing the amount of people who could theoretically benefit from these medical improvements, new treatments also have to be accessible and affordable so that they can really make a significant difference in the patients' states. This is why the CMS has decided to publish even more information on medication on its platform.
Public Cost Of Medicare/Medicaid Services
Better medication would imply tracking the drug prices in order to clearly follow the benefits of each of the medical treatments on the market. To do this, the CMS released an interactive tool in 2015, whose sole purpose is to track the prices that the drugs purchased by Medicare beneficiaries were sold at.
The database that is monitored through this platform is the spending per user, per the entire program, and per unit costs which increased during the last few years. The tool also provides its users with graphs and charts showing information on the drugs' evolution during the last half a decade.
The drug spending dashboard displays all the spending and utilization information on a specific drug, in a consumer-friendly manner, in order to provide the users with relevant information on the spending, use and trends of the medications in point.
CMS Dashboard Improvements
As part of the strategy aimed at better informing the patients on their current medication programs, the CMS has planned to update the tool with even more insight, in order to help the patient better understand the overall market condition of the drugs they are using for their diseases.
Information on drugs that are purchased by Medicaid beneficiaries is one of the two new categories that will be included into the platform. The other one is in respect to the medication manufacturers and high level information on their rebates, in order to provide the patients with perspective on the drugs' costs.
As the tendency of purchasing prescription drugs increased, reaching roughly $457 billion in 2015 alone, the CMS decided to keep its customers informed on every transaction that they make as part of their treatment. The spending is expected to register approximately 6.7 percent every year through 2025.
