Generic Drugs Should Be Cheap But Sometimes They Aren't

The Wall Street Journal reports Generic Drugs Should Be Cheap, but Insurers Are Charging Thousands of Dollars for Them

The cancer drug Gleevec went generic in 2016 and can be bought today for as little as $55 a month. But many patients' insurance plans are paying more than 100 times that.

CVS Health and Cigna can charge $6,600 a month or more for Gleevec prescriptions, a Wall Street Journal analysis of pricing data found. They are able to do that because they set the prices with pharmacies, which they sometimes own.

Across a selection of these so-called specialty generic drugs, Cigna and CVS's prices were at least 24 times higher on average than roughly what the medicines' manufacturers charge, the Journal found.

The prices at UnitedHealth Group, which also owns a large health insurer, were 3.5 times as much, according to the analysis of data compiled by 46brooklyn Research, a nonprofit drug-pricing analytics group.

Price Gap

Cigna's prices were 27.4 times higher than Cuban's on average for 19 generic drugs.

CVS's prices were 24.2 times higher on average for 17 generic drugs.

UnitedHealth's prices were 3.5 times higher than Cuban's on average for 19 generic drugs.