Most people pay less than $20! But yeah, some pay $1,167

Yesterday was the official deadline for PhRMA member companies to begin putting pricing information in their TV ads. Well, sort of.

PhRMA members decided last October not to include sticker prices in their TV ads, as the Trump administration proposed. Instead, they collectively agreed to include a link to pricing information. The deadline for companies to put that link in their ads was yesterday, April 15.

Like any good gonzo journalist, I dug deep into three scintillating new pricing websites from Pfizer, Allergan, and Eli Lilly. Pfizer gets the win for the most user-friendly site. It was easy to click through and even had handy charts showing the distribution of what percentage of patients paid what price for each drug. However, all three websites also made it clear that these prices vary far too widely for drug makers to make a meaningful price estimate without knowing a patient’s individual insurance information.

Take Pfizer’s rheumatoid arthritis drug Xeljanz: Pfizer’s website says 52% of commercially insured patients pay less than $20. But when you scroll down, you can see that 14% of patients pay more than $200. Scroll down even farther and you find this: “People who paid $200+ paid $1,167.47 on average.”

That being said, is this any less misleading than the Trump administration's idea of posting just the list price in ads? (The list price for Xeljanz, just for comparison’s sake, is $4,480.63 per month.) Keep an eye out for HHS’ final regulation requiring price disclosures in ads, which is expected imminently.