Medicare and its beneficiaries could have saved an estimated $17.7 billion earlier this decade on generic versions of older medicines instead of paying for newer, chemically similar but more expensive brand-name drugs that companies launched to replace those older pills, according to a new analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
For example, Medicare spent $13.4 billion on the Nexium acid reflux pill between 2011 and 2017, but could have saved $12.7 billion if, instead, prescriptions were written for generic copies of the older version of the drug called Prilosec. Similarly, Medicare beneficiaries spent more than $832 million on Nexium between 2011 and 2015, but could have $690 million if prescribed a generic version of Prilosec.
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