Review of Pharmacy Acquisition Costs for Drugs Reimbursed Under the Medicaid Prescription Drug Program of the Nebraska Department of Social Services

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

At the request of the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), the Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted a nationwide review of pharmacy acquisition costs for drugs reimbursed under the Medicaid prescription drug program. Since most States reimburse pharmacies for Medicaid prescriptions using a formula which discounts the average wholesale price (AWP), the objective of our review was to develop an estimate of the discount below AWP at which pharmacies purchase brand name and generic drugs.

To accomplish our objective, we selected a random sample of 11 States from a universe of 48 States and the District of Columbia. Arizona was excluded from the universe of States because the Medicaid drug program is a demonstration project using prepaid capitation financing and Tennessee was excluded because of a waiver received to implement a statewide managed care program for Medicaid. Nebraska was one of the sample States selected, as well as California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Additionally, we selected a sample of Medicaid pharmacy providers from each State and obtained invoices of their drug purchases. The pharmacies were selected from each of five categories--rural-chain, rural-independent, urban-chain, urban-independent, and non-traditional pharmacies (nursing home pharmacies, hospital pharmacies, etc.). We included the non-traditional category so as to be able to exclude those pharmacies from our overall estimates. We believed such pharmacies purchase drugs at substantially greater discounts than retail pharmacies, and including them would have inflated our percentages.

We compared each invoice drug price to AWP for that drug and calculated the percentage, if any, by which the invoice price was discounted below AWP. We then projected those differences to the universe of pharmacies in each category for each State and calculated an overall estimate for each State. Additionally, we projected the results from each State to estimate the nationwide difference between AWP and invoice price for each category.

In Nebraska we obtained pricing information from 43 pharmacies. Specifically, we obtained 2,742 invoice prices for brand name drugs, and 1,114 invoice prices for generic drugs. For Nebraska the overall estimate of the extent that invoice prices were discounted below AWP was 18.7 percent for brand name drugs and 44.9 percent for generic drugs. The national estimates are 18.3 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively. The estimates combine the results for four categories of pharmacies including rural-chain, rural-independent, urban-chain, and urban-independent and exclude the results obtained from non-traditional pharmacies.

We are recommending that the Nebraska Department of Social Services (State Agency) consider the results of this review as a factor in any future changes to pharmacy reimbursement for Medicaid drugs. We will share the information with HCFA from all 11 States in a consolidation report for their use in evaluating the overall Medicaid drug program.

The Director of the State Agency responded to our draft report in a letter dated, October 16, 1996. The Director stated that our review was the first information of its type that the State Agency has had access to in 10 years. The Director also stated that the information would be useful to the State Agency in setting adequate pharmacy reimbursement rates in the future.