Prescription Drugs

With the incoming Trump administration and Republican-led Congress looking to ways to reduce federal spending, this Poll finds that the Medicare and Medicaid programs remain broadly popular, and more people favor more spending on those programs than less spending. Among potential actions on health, the public sees price transparency and limiting chemicals in food as top priorities. Few say so about cuts to Medicaid and restrictions on abortion.

Fielded a week after the 2018 midterm elections, this poll examines the public’s priorities for the next Congress, measures favorability for ACA provisions including Medicaid expansion, and takes a look at knowledge of the current open enrollment period among adults ages 18-64 who purchase their own insurance or are currently uninsured. With the impending Texas v. United States lawsuit, in addition to several Trump administration policy actions aimed at different aspects of the U.S. health care system, this KFF survey also examines the public’s position on pre-existing conditions protections, prescription drug advertisements, and employer exemptions from covering birth control.

This Health Policy 101 chapter explores the performance of the U.S. health system on a number of cost, outcomes, and quality measures by comparing it with those in similarly large and wealthy OECD nations. It highlights that despite significant spending, Americans have shorter life expectancies and encounter more barriers to health care, influenced by both the health system’s structure and broader socioeconomic factors.

This brief examines the implications of rising prescriptions for costly GLP-1 drugs for state Medicaid programs as more states consider covering the drugs for weight loss. It examines recent trends in Medicaid prescriptions and gross spending on GLP-1s, and explores the potential implications of expanding coverage obesity drugs for Medicaid programs.

This brief provides an overview of the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit, including current data on plan availability, enrollment, and spending and financing, and highlights recent changes under the Inflation Reduction Act.

This policy watch examines the implications of new proposed regulations that would allow Medicare and require Medicaid to cover drugs used to treat obesity, including a relatively new class of highly effective but costly drugs known as GLP-1s.

This analysis finds that Medicare’s negotiated prices for 10 high-expenditure prescription drugs are lower than what private Medicare drug plans had been paying, but still much higher than the prices available in 11 other wealthy nations.. It is available on the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced the drugs selected for the second round of negotiation for the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, which was established by the Inflation Reduction Act. These FAQs address several questions related to Medicare’s drug price negotiation program and CMS’s implementation of the program, with a focus on the details that apply for 2027, the second year that negotiated prices will be available under the program.