For clinician-administered drugs, researchers find no association between price increases and OOP cost increases

It seems ob­vi­ous to as­sume that pa­tient out-of-pock­et costs would in­crease as drug com­pa­nies raise the prices of their drugs. But a new study pub­lished yes­ter­day in Health Ser­vices Re­search from Har­vard Med­ical School au­thors shows that for one ma­jor class of drugs, the sto­ry is more com­pli­cat­ed.

From 2009 to 2018, the prices of drugs that were ad­min­is­tered by doc­tors, as op­posed to ones pa­tients take them­selves, rose 4.4% per year. And at the same time, pa­tients’ me­di­an out-of-pock­et costs in­creased 9.6% per year, ac­count­ing for in­fla­tion.

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