April 21, 2011 
I’m not really sure if this surprises anyone, but it seems to be making news. Generics drug prices increase much slower than brand drug prices, and with the huge increase in GFR over the past 5-10 years, trend has slowed down.
The total 2010 spend on prescriptions was $307B. This was up just 2.3% from 2009.
The interesting point in this recent data from IMS is that the utilization growth rate for Rxs has slowed to historically low levels also.
One might attribute some of this to saturation although I think we’re far from that. Others might see a backlash against medicine and a search for more natural remedies. But, the key fact that they talk about is the drop in MD visits which can certainly be correlated to the economy. In 2010, there were 1.54B office visits…a decline of 4.2%.
“Pharmacies filled 0.5 percent fewer prescriptions in 2010 than in 2009 for pills, capsules and nasal spray medications — about 60 percent of total spending on medications. For medicines that are injected or infused, total volume rose even less, just 0.2 percent.”
Enabling Healthy Decisions 
This continues a pattern of either negative or very small increases since 1993 according to data compiled for the patented medicine price index PMPI which measures the average year-over-year change in the prices of patented drugs sold in Canada.