Second annual report reveals costs, profits associated with manufacture, sale of diabetes drugs

Drug companies made an average of $1.52 in profit for every $1 they spent on manufacturing and administration for diabetes drugs in 2018, just six cents less than the average profits they reported receiving the year before, according to the second annual diabetes drug pricing report released by the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services last week.

The findings of the report held fairly consistent with the results of the first diabetes drug pricing report released earlier this year. The state is required to produce the reports annually pursuant to a diabetes drug pricing law passed by the Legislature in 2017. This session, lawmakers approved and Gov. Steve Sisolak signed into law a bill that will impose the same reporting requirements on asthma drugs.

In total, the state identified 695 so-called national drug codes — which refer to a specific drug in a specific amount in a specific packaging — for essential diabetes drugs in 2018. Of those, 155, or 22.4 percent, experienced a significant price increase over the previous one or two years. (A drug is determined to have a “significant price increase” if its cost increased by more than the medical care component of the Consumer Price Index over the last one or two years.)

“Price increase percentages greater than these published values during each one-year period cannot be justified alone as maintaining pace with general medical inflation,” the report states.

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