What drugs cost in Medicare Part D

We stumbled upon this Part D data set in early January 2020 and immediately set out to study it and tell its story. Part of the process became creating a new dashboard, to make it easier for the public to learn from the data. CMS already provides a dashboard, but it is notably lacking a few bells and whistles, including identifiers to separate brand-name from generic drugs, and specialty from non-specialty drugs. So we spent some time adding these flags to the database and republished this viz to supplement CMS’ very noble efforts to help educate the public with this dataset. The end result is our Medicare Part D Drug Pricing Dashboard.

If you are interested in learning more about this visualization, or reading our thoughts on what this tells us, please make sure to read the companion research report to this visualization (original version).

Data Sources and How we Created The Dataset

The 46brooklyn Medicare Part D Drug Pricing Dashboard is completely assembled from the raw Part D spending data available here. Note that we house historic data that CMS has dropped off their datasets so our dashboard goes back to 2015 (i.e., data you won’t find at that link)

The only added work we put into this was:

  1. converting the CMS excel spreadsheet into a standard format that could be easily consumed by Tableau (or any program you use to analyze data)

  2. flagging all drugs as BRAND, GENERIC, DME (Durable Medical Equipment), or VACCINE. We used a variety of data sources at our disposal to do this. Please note that we had to make judgment calls on some of the more obscure drugs in the list. If you believe we have erroneously classified any drugs let us know.

  3. flagging all drugs as SPECIALTY drugs (or not) based on CMS’ definition of a specialty drug (>$830 per month’s treatment). To do this, we simply divided total spending by total beneficiaries to get annual cost per beneficiary. Then we divided by 12 to get an estimated cost per month per beneficiary.

Click here to download our full underlying database.

How to Use   

Please see the companion report to this visualization for instructions on how to use the tool.

Update Frequency

  • Once a year (when CMS releases the data)

v 1.2 - posted May 1, 2024
For full release notes click here