Understanding Your Drug Costs: Follow the Pill

Understanding Your Drug Costs: Follow the Pill begins with a typical transaction at your local pharmacy. It then traces that purchase back through a series of complex transactions that occur throughout the pharmaceutical distribution and insurance chain. The video breaks down the differences between the list price and the net price of a medicine, explains how the various actors (e.g., pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), wholesalers, insurance companies, etc.) in the health care ecosystem operate to deliver medicines to patients and at what cost, and demonstrates why it is that a biopharmaceutical company has very little power to determine what a patient ultimately pays for his or her medicine.