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\n A box of Ozempic at a pharmacy in Los Angeles on Aug. 6, 2025.<\/p>\n
Eric Thayer\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
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Eric Thayer\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The federal government has announced <\/a>the results of the latest round of Medicare drug price negotiations: 15 lower drug prices for Medicare to go into effect in 2027.<\/p>\n Medicare will get a 71% discount on Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus, blockbuster drugs for obesity and Type 2 diabetes that have current list prices of around a thousand dollars a month.<\/p>\n The negotiations also included drugs for asthma, breast cancer and leukemia. The discounts ranged from<\/a> 38% for Austedo, which treats Huntington’s disease, to 85% for Janumet for Type 2 diabetes.<\/p>\n “President Trump directed us to stop at nothing to lower health care costs for the American people,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in a press release. “As we work to Make America Healthy Again, we will use every tool at our disposal to deliver affordable health care to seniors.”<\/p>\n The program that covers drugs for more than 50 million seniors negotiated its first batch of drug prices<\/a> last year, after the passage of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. <\/p>\n A provision of that law, passed without Republican support, ended Medicare’s 20-year ban on negotiating drug prices.<\/p>\n Negotiations for this second batch of 15 drugs wrapped up at the end of October.<\/p>\n The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) say the new, lower Medicare prices would have saved the program $12 billion dollars if the lower negotiated prices had been in effect in 2024.<\/p>\n The latest negotiated prices are great news for taxpayers and patients, says Dr. Benjamin Rome<\/a>, health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Federal taxpayers fund much of Medicare, but beneficiaries also must pay copays and coinsurance.<\/p>\n “This is more savings than the first round, but a lot of that has to do with the nature of the drugs being negotiated this year and probably some learning from experience,” he says.<\/p>\n Drugs were selected earlier this year based on criteria written into the law. They had to have no generic or biosimilar competition, account for a high amount of Medicare spending and be on the market for a number of years.<\/p>\n