Secret Rebates: Why Patients Pay $600 for Drugs That Cost $300

Many employers and insurers have come up with a simple way to avoid the problem for many of their clients: exempt medicine for diabetes and other chronic conditions from deductibles in the first place.

But why not break up the rebate checks and send the cash back to the patients who paid for the drugs? Representatives of corporate health plans say it would be impractical to do so because they get the money months after employees bought the drugs.

Says Laurel Pickering, chief executive of the Northeast Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers: “It would be very difficult to figure out how to administer that.”