Drug pricing is complicated, and as lawmakers and consumers lament the rising costs of medicines, often overlooked in the discourse is the impact of the growing disconnect that exists between the list prices of medicines and the net prices of those drugs after all drugmaker concessions are accounted for. Further complicating matters is the degree with which those concessions are – or more importantly, aren’t – being reflected in the prices paid patients and plan sponsors. In this study, we used the publicly available Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) pricing data to develop a net drug price estimate for brand pharmaceuticals in the U.S. We then analyzed our estimate to known net drug prices and found that our estimate produced similar results to the stated net price by the manufacturer. While other researchers and organizations have developed estimates of net prices based on a “top-down” approach by exploring drug manufacturer financial statements and sales data, our methods may be best described as “bottom-up,” as they are developed for individual products based upon the public FSS data.
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