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CMS Part D SpendingCMS Medicare Part D Spending by Drug
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) · Tier-1 · research-only (never on individual profiles)
The CMS Medicare Part D Spending by Drug file reports per-drug Part D spending — total spend, claims, beneficiaries, dosage units, average spend, a high-spend outlier flag, and year-over-year change — by brand, generic, and manufacturer. It is drug-keyed and carries no provider identifier; the 'Overall' manufacturer row is the aggregate across all manufacturers of a drug.
How this source shows up on Fonteum.
Tier-1 drug-level Medicare Part D spending reference for /data and /research pages, keyed on brand × generic × manufacturer. The read API resolves on the brand name. There is no NPI and no entity-graph linkage.
What this source does NOT mean
Part D spending describes drug-level program cost — it is not a statement about any prescriber or provider, not a clinical recommendation, and a high-spend drug is not a Fonteum judgment about the drug or its manufacturer.
Research and data questions this source supports.
- Pull total Medicare Part D spending, claims, and beneficiaries for a drug by brand, generic, and manufacturer.
- Build a drug-cost trend view using the year-over-year change in average spend per dosage unit.
- Identify high-spend outlier drugs for a prescription-cost research study.
- Cross-reference Part D spending against Drugs@FDA approvals and the NDC directory by manufacturer.
Dataset size: 14,309 drug × manufacturer rows (2026-06-14 snapshot)
Per-field display contract.
Fields listed below show their configured `display_allowed` flag from the §94 provenance schema. Fields marked write-locked are captured for audit and are not rendered on profile pages.
Research-only — never on profiles
8 fieldsWhat we can’t infer from this source.
- Drug-keyed (brand + generic + manufacturer) — there is no provider NPI and no entity-graph linkage.
- Tier-1 — aggregate research context only; never rendered on individual provider profiles.
- Fonteum holds the latest published data year; the file lags the calendar year.
- Spending is a program-cost fact, not a quality or appropriateness measure of the drug or manufacturer.
Authority, license, publisher cadence.
Authority
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)
Tier
Tier-1 · research-only (never on individual profiles)
Publisher / configured cadence
Declared or configured cadence: Annual — CMS republishes the Part D Spending by Drug file under a fresh release-dated path. Not evidence of the latest loaded source date.
License
U.S. government public-domain works. Free to use with attribution; explicit redistribution rights. License ↗
Official URL
Attribution requirement
Source: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — Medicare Part D Spending by Drug · Data Year {YYYY}
What the source allows.
U.S. government public-domain works. CMS publishes the Medicare Part D Spending by Drug file as a no-auth bulk CSV at data.cms.gov with explicit redistribution rights. Snapshot and attestation fields must be read from the specific artifact; no provenance fact currently links deterministically to a signature.
What a single field looks like in the graph.
This worked example shows the provenance shape used when a surfaced field has populated source, last-checked, display-rule, and confidence metadata. Individual fields may omit unavailable values.
Field
Per-drug Part D spending (research-only)
Sample value
Example Brand · Overall · 2023 · total spending $12.5M · 84,000 beneficiaries
Provenance line
Source: CMS Medicare Part D Spending by Drug · Data Year 2023 · Methodology cms-part-d-spending/v1 · Display rule: drug-keyed — renders on dataset + research pages, no provider linkage
Official API, bulk download, and Fonteum endpoints.
Official API / download
Fonteum surface
Common questions about CMS Part D Spending.
- What is the CMS Medicare Part D Spending by Drug file?
- It reports per-drug Medicare Part D spending — total spend, claims, beneficiaries, dosage units, average spend, a high-spend outlier flag, and year-over-year change — by brand, generic, and manufacturer. The 'Overall' manufacturer row is the aggregate across all manufacturers of a drug.
- Is this linked to prescribers?
- No. The file is drug-keyed (brand + generic + manufacturer) and carries no provider identifier — there is no NPI and no entity-graph linkage. The read API resolves on the brand name.
- Which data year is covered?
- Fonteum holds the latest published data year (2023 in the current snapshot). As of the 2026-06-14 snapshot, the table holds 14,309 drug × manufacturer rows.
- Where is the data published and is it free?
- CMS publishes the file annually at data.cms.gov as a no-auth bulk CSV. It is U.S. government public-domain data — free to download and redistribute with attribution. Fonteum resolves the live CSV by the stable dataset UUID and attests each snapshot.
- Does high spending mean a drug is overpriced?
- No. Spending is a program-cost fact driven by price and volume together. It is not a quality or appropriateness measure of the drug or manufacturer, and it is not a Fonteum judgment.
Where this source already shows up.
Related sources in the graph
- /sources → The generated source-catalog subset — documented datasets Fonteum cites.
- /data-provenance → The provider graph — pipeline diagram, source-family clusters, field-level provenance examples, display rules.
- /methodology → Documented sourcing, publisher cadence, observed freshness, and corrections policy.
- /editorial-policy → Independence, sourcing, conflicts, corrections, retractions.