Skyrocketing price tags for new drugs to treat rare diseases have stoked outrage nationwide. But hundreds of old, commonly used drugs cost the Medicaid program billions of extra dollars in 2016 versus 2015, a Kaiser Health News data analysis shows. Eighty of the drugs -- some generic and some still carrying brand names -- proved more than two decades old.
Even after a medicine has gone generic, the branded version often remains on the market. Medicaid recipients might choose to purchase it because they're brand loyalists or because state laws prevent pharmacists from automatically substituting generics. Drugs driving Medicaid spending increases ranged from common asthma medicines like Ventolin to over-the-counter painkillers like the generic form of Aleve to generic antidepressants and heartburn medicines.
Among the stark examples:
- Ventolin, originally approved in 1981, treats and prevents spasms that constrict patients' airways and make it difficult to breathe. When a gram of it went from $2.58 to $2.90 on average, Medicaid paid out an extra $54.5 million for the drug.
- Naproxen sodium, a painkiller originally approved in 1994 as brand-name Aleve, went from costing Medicaid an average of $0.72 to $1.70 a pill, an increase of 136%. Overall, the change cost the program an extra $10 million in 2016.
- Generic metformin hydrochloride, an oral Type 2 diabetes drug that's been around since the 1990s, went from an average 10 cents to 13 cents a pill from 2015 to 2016. Those extra three pennies per pill cost Medicaid a combined $8.3 million in 2016. And cost increases for the extended-release, authorized generic version cost the program another $6.5 million.