Solutions to Help Make Health Care More Affordable

American families identify the cost of health care as their most significant financial issue.i At CVS Health, we believe that improving health care affordability requires pursuing bold innovations that put patients at the center of their health care.

Recognizing our role as a front door to health care in more than 10,000 communities nationwide, we’re committed to finding solutions that make accessing and affording health care easier.

Providing Convenient, Cost Effective Care

One in four Americans reports that they lack regular access to primary careii – making it difficult to find the right care at the right time. Currently, we offer more than 1,100 convenient MinuteClinic locations nationwide delivering preventive care and screenings, disease monitoring and management, and acute care for many common illnesses. Research shows that receiving care at a MinuteClinic has the potential to provide up to 80% in cost savings compared to emergency rooms, where many patients go for immediate care when access to primary care is limited in their communities.

Lowering Out-Of-Pocket Medicine Costs

More than half of U.S. adults regularly take at least one prescription medicineiii, and recent data show that the average price of brand prescription drugs increased 58% from $231 to $364 over the past five yearsiv. We’re doing our part to connect patients and their providers to lower cost medicines that work just as well as higher cost ones.

  • We recently launched the most comprehensive program in the industry to save patients money on their medications. As part of this program, we introduced the CVS Pharmacy Rx Savings Finder – a new savings and discount capability that allows our more than 30,000 retail pharmacists nationwide to quickly evaluate individual prescription savings opportunities right at the pharmacy counter. This new tool is estimated to provide $420 average annual savings at the pharmacy counter.
  • Through our formulary management strategy, we encourage the use of biosimilars to leverage market competition and promote the use of lower-cost alternatives. For example, we were the first major PBM to place a biosimilar on our formulary and were able to help 91 percent of patients using a higher cost brand name drug transition to a lower-cost therapeutic alternative in about six months.

For more information about CVS Health’s efforts to lower health care costs across the nation, visit our Cost of Care information center and the CVS Health Impact Dashboard. To stay informed about the latest updates and innovations from CVS Health, register for content alerts and our bi-weekly health care newsletter.

05.04.18

i  http://news.gallup.com/poll/212780/cost-healthcare-americans-top-financial-concern.aspx

ii  https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/Access-to-Health-Services

iii  https://www.consumerreports.org/prescription-drugs/too-many-meds-americas-love-affair-with-prescription-medication/

iv  https://www.iqvia.com/institute/reports/medicine-use-and-spending-in-the-us-review-of-2017-outlook-to-2022