Report: U.S. Specialty-med Spending on the Rise

A new report from Express Scripts indicates that spending on traditional meds may still be on the rise, but it's the complex treatments for multiple sclerosis, cancer, inflammatory conditions and other diseases that are really capturing the dollars.

Branded drug prices grew by 9.6 percent overall last year. But specialty-drug spending grew by 19.6 percent. And while traditional branded meds had to fight cheaper generics--whose prices dropped by more than 10 percent--those specialty drugs generally have few to no generic rivals, and even with new legislation allo