Specialty Drug Spending Is Key Driver

A federal report finds that specialty drugs are driving overall spending on prescription drugs higher, although the full extent of their impact is difficult to calculate due to a lack of agreement on what constitutes a “specialty” drug.

Overall drug spending was $457 billion in 2015, roughly 16.7 percent of overall personal healthcare services.  Not only was this a sizable increase over previous years, but overall drug spending is projected to “continue to rise faster than overall health spending,” according to a report from HHS’ Office Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Drawn from multiple data sets covering the past five years of healthcare spending, the report notes that the rise in drug spending since 2010 can be attributed to multiple factors: 30 percent to increases in prescription per patient, 30 percent to inflationary increases and 10 percent to population growth, but the remaining 30 percent is due to “either changes in the composition of drugs prescribed toward higher price products or price increases for drugs.”