IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0294164.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pharmacy and neighborhood-level variation in cash price of diabetes medications in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Haider J Warraich
  • Hasan K Siddiqi
  • Diane G Li
  • Jeroen van Meijgaard
  • Muthiah Vaduganathan

Abstract

Background: Diabetes medications place significant financial burden on patients but less is known about factors affecting cost variation. Objective: To examine pharmacy and neighborhood factors associated with cost variation for diabetes drugs in the US. Research design, subjects and measures: We used all-payer US pharmacy data from 45,874 chain and independent pharmacies reflecting 7,073,909 deidentified claims. We divided diabetes drugs into insulins, non-insulin generic medications, and brand name medications. Generalized linear models, stratified by pharmacy type, identified pharmacy and neighborhood factors associated with higher or lower cash price-per-unit (PPU) for each set of drugs. Results: Cash PPU was highest for brand name therapies ($149.4±203.2), followed by insulins ($42.4±25.0), and generic therapies ($1.3±4.4). Pharmacy-level price variation was greater for non-insulin generic therapies than insulins or brand name therapies. Chain pharmacies had both lower prices and lesser variation compared with independent pharmacies. Conclusions: Cash prices for diabetes medications in the US can vary considerably and that the greatest degree of price variation occurs in non-insulin generic therapies.

Suggested Citation

  • Haider J Warraich & Hasan K Siddiqi & Diane G Li & Jeroen van Meijgaard & Muthiah Vaduganathan, 2023. "Pharmacy and neighborhood-level variation in cash price of diabetes medications in the United States," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 18(12), pages 1-7, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0294164
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294164
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294164
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0294164&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0294164?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0294164. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.