Amgen Cuts Cholesterol Treatment's Price -- WSJ
October 25 2019 - 3:02AM
Dow Jones News
By Joseph Walker
This article is being republished as part of our daily
reproduction of WSJ.com articles that also appeared in the U.S.
print edition of The Wall Street Journal (October 25, 2019).
Amgen Inc. said it will sell the cholesterol drug Repatha only
at a list price 60% lower than what the company had originally
charged, in a bid to make the medicine more affordable to patients
and kick-start sales.
Starting next year, Repatha will list for $5,850 a year for all
insurers, the biotech said Thursday. Amgen began offering the
treatment at the lower price last year, but still supplied Repatha
in some cases at the original price of more than $14,000.
The latest move could help reduce the amount that patients pay
for the drug at the pharmacy counter, and reduce the number of
patients who don't fill their prescriptions because their copays
are too expensive.
After Repatha was approved in 2015, analysts thought it could
ring up billions of dollars in sales. But that hasn't happened in
large part because insurers have restricted coverage of the drug
because of its price. In the second quarter, Amgen reported just
$91 million in sales from Repatha.
To encourage more use, Amgen last year created a new version of
Repatha priced at $5,850 a year. Though it has a different product
number code, the new version is identical to its more-expensive
counterpart.
The company temporarily still offered the original list price
option of more than $14,000, which Amgen discounted heavily in the
form of rebates. Some health plans offered only the higher-priced
Repatha, which meant patients faced bigger out-of-pocket costs.
Amgen said it kept selling the higher-priced product to allow
time for insurers and pharmacy benefit managers to adjust to the
loss of rebates. In it latest announcement, the company said it
will stop selling the higher-priced version after Dec. 31.
Several pharmaceutical companies have cut the list prices of
drugs in the past year in an effort to extend to patients the
discounts they were already providing to pharmacy benefit managers,
known as PBMs, which negotiate prices on behalf of insurers and
employers.
Sanofi SA and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. sell a cut-rate
version of their own anti-cholesterol medicine Praluent -- which
competes with Repatha -- at a 60% discount to the original list
price.
Gilead Sciences Inc. in January launched generic versions of two
hepatitis C medicines priced at discounts of 68% and 62%,
respectively, to their branded counterparts. Eli Lilly & Co.
said in March that it would market a half-priced version of its
diabetes medicine Humalog.
The price cuts have typically been for drugs that were already
being discounted heavily with rebates. But rebates often failed to
ease the direct costs shouldered by patients in Medicare Part D and
high-deductible commercial health plans that require them to pay a
percentage of a drug's list price before rebates are applied.
About half of Medicare Part D patients taking Repatha will have
copays of less than $50 per prescription next year, Amgen said. By
discontinuing the higher-priced version of the drug, the company
said it expects to increase the portion of patients with copays of
$50 or less.
Some Medicare patients are required to pay as much as $370 per
month for Repatha, causing about three-quarters of patients to
abandon their prescriptions, said BMO Capital Markets analyst Do
Kim in a note to clients on Thursday.
He said Amgen's termination of the higher-priced product should
increase the number of patients paying fixed $50 copays and bring
down the abandonment rate closer to the 19% observed in commercial
plans.
Write to Joseph Walker at joseph.walker@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 25, 2019 02:47 ET (06:47 GMT)
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