Shred the gnarly Medicare Part D Drug pricing slopes

It’s the middle of July. A time of year for pool parties, barbecues, campfires. and generally sweating your butt off. It’s a relaxing time of year for the majority of us. But what about the ski bums out there? It’s a long six months (five if you are lucky) until the first big dump of the year.

At 46brooklyn, we sympathize with impatiently waiting for things – except rather than waiting to shred the gnar, we’ve been anxiously waiting to shred through Medicare Part D drug pricing data. Good news, drug pricing enthusiasts; we have a big (data) dump for you!

After months of work on our newest drug pricing tool, we are pleased to release the Medicare Part D Drug Pricing Ski Slope dashboard. In this viz, we give you the ability to select one of many drugs (brand and generic, oral solid and non-oral solid), and view the price set by thousands of Part D plans for your selected drug. For good measure, we added a line to show you the true market-based cost of the drug (based on NADAC), so you can see how frustratingly random Part D pricing is by different plans for the same drug.

Data Sources

• CMS Prescription Drug Plan Formulary, Pharmacy Network, and Pricing Information Files (Q1 2019)

• CMS National Average Drug Acquisition Cost (NADAC) database

How we Created our Dataset

For an explanation on how we created the dataset please read our report entitled “New Medicare Part D 'Ski Slope' Shows Seniors' Wild Drug Pricing Ride,” published on July 14, 2019.

How to Use   

For a detailed tutorial on how to use this visualization, please read our report entitled “New Medicare Part D 'Ski Slope' Shows Seniors' Wild Drug Pricing Ride,” published on July 14, 2019.

Update Frequency

• Quarterly

v 1.0 - posted July 13, 2019
For full release notes click here