Affordable drug prices
Helping make it happen for consumers and clients
Why we’re focused on lowering drug prices
The price of prescription drugs remains too high and out of reach for far too many in the United States. Lowering drug prices is a prerequisite to controlling health care costs, which in turn determines affordability, enhances access to care and improves outcomes. Competition in the pharmaceutical marketplace lowers drug costs and can be improved by increasing the number of approved drugs available to patients and removing barriers to market entry for new medications.
We’ve introduced two important innovative solutions to reshape the future of drug pricing, bringing greater transparency and simplicity to the system. Launching for commercials payors in 2025, CVS CostVantage will help shift how our retail pharmacy is compensated by aligning pharmacy reimbursement to the quality services our pharmacy teams provide and the prescriptions we dispense. TrueCost is our PBM’s response to a rapidly changing landscape in the marketplace. We’ve heard the call — from our clients, from lawmakers, and from pharmacies — for greater pricing transparency, predictability and sustainability. And we are answering it.
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Initiatives we support
Necessary reforms include ending pharmaceutical manufacturer gaming of the drug patent system through practices like evergreening and product hopping, and reducing biologic exclusivity from 12 to 7 years to encourage manufacturers to bring more biosimilars to market.
Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) employ various tools and strategies to provide their clients with options to help promote cost-effective choices, and the ability to use these tools and strategies should be preserved and expanded.
Among other things, we support changing the design of Medicare Part B fee-for-service cost sharing to encourage beneficiaries to choose more cost-effective drug products and changing provider reimbursement to provide physician incentives to prescribe and administer lower-cost drug products. We’re proud to have launched Cordavis to bring high quality products to market with the goal of reducing drug spend and ensuring access to affordable medicines.
