Healthcare costs continue to rise, leaving employers scrambling to manage benefits expenses. The Business Group on Health 2025 Employer Health Care Strategy Survey found that 76% of employers are “very concerned” about overall pharmacy costs. While GLP-1 drugs have dominated recent conversations, a new pharmaceutical cost challenge is emerging for benefits leaders: gene therapies.
These cutting-edge medications carry price tags reaching hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per treatment. Although their per-member-per-year (PMPY) impact has remained relatively low due to the rare nature of the conditions they treat, that’s changing quickly. After reviewing trends in a health data set covering 300 million people in the U.S., we see that utilization rates for gene therapies have grown 42%, and PMPY spend doubled from 2022 to 2024. And we’re expecting this expansion to accelerate even further.
