Big Pharma says discounts make its sky-high list prices meaningless. Not quite

The pharmaceutical industry has long said that list prices aren’t a reliable indicator of what Americans pay for prescription drugs because big customers, including health insurers and pharmacy beneft managers, negotiate discounts. Yet a Bloomberg analysis of 38 medicines with global sales of more than $1 billion a year showed that 29 of them logged price increases of more than double the rate of inflation from 2009 to 2015, even after estimated discounts were factored in.