MedPage Today (8/7, Henderson) reports, “For young people with opioid use disorder (OUD), buprenorphine costs have declined overall but with drastic variation by payer type,” researchers concluded in findingspublished online Aug. 7 in a research letter in JAMA Pediatrics. After “examining buprenorphine prescriptions dispensed for U.S. youth ages 12 to 19,” investigators found that “mean daily out-of-pocket costs declined 57.6% from 2015 through 2020 (from $4.03 to $1.71), with an increasing percentage of prescriptions paid by Medicaid.” Nevertheless, “those costs were approximately 24 times higher with commercial payers and 119 times higher for self-pay than with Medicaid in 2020,” the study team concluded.
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