Category: Employee Benefits

Pharmacy Benefit Managers Report Significant Decrease in Trends for 2015

It’s that time of year again, the time when Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) release their annual drug trend analyses for the prior year.  To the surprise of many, the two largest PBMs in the country, CVS Caremark (CVS) and Express Scripts (ESI), reported 2015 trends at less than half of 2014 trends. CVS reported their annual trend at 5.0% while ESI reported a trend of 5.2%.  Compare these trends to the approximate 12% trend reported in 2014 – a shocker right?  According to CVS, brand-name drug inflation drove to 80% of aggregate drug trend.

Let’s break these numbers down a bit more.  ESI reported that specialty drugs trended at 17.8% while non-specialty drugs trended at -0.1%.  High specialty drug trends are nothing new and are here to stay. You should expect specialty drug trends to remain around 17% and drive an overall drug trend of roughly 7.5% over the next several years.

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Health Insurance Captives Turn Risk Into Opportunity

Many businesses and individual employees are planning to spend more for healthcare this year. According to the 2015 Scott Benefit Services Mid-Market Benefits Benchmarking Survey, 2016 will …Continue Reading

Why the Latest ACA Repeal Attempt Actually Means Something

On January 8, President Obama vetoed the bill that would repeal significant parts of the ACA and defund Planned Parenthood for a year. On its face this just seems like another pointless repeal attempt by the GOP, (as they have tallied over 50 attempts at this point). However, this one needs to have an asterisk beside it.

The reason this one is different is because it actually made it to President Obama’s desk to get vetoed.  Why that means something is because most prognosticators believe that Republicans will keep the House and the Senate in the 2016 election so only the White House is really up for grabs.  While Republicans probably won’t have a veto-proof majority in 2017 (just like they don’t now), this proves they don’t need one to get at least a version of repeal to the president’s desk.  So if the president in 2017 is Trump, Rubio, Cruz, Bush (insert name here), then they have proven they will be able to get a bill to repeal significant portions of the law through budget reconciliation to their desk.

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