You probably don’t know there’s a coupon out there, but the pharmacist does. So when you take your prescription into the pharmacy or comes in through Surescripts. They immediately go and pull a coupon down. And so it offsets your insurance copayments. So if you had a $2,000 deductible, right? Just depending on the program it may pay all $2,000 that it may pay a portion of it. But the ultimate goal of copay assistance programs is to remove the financial barriers associated with patients accessing and remaining on therapy that’s the number one thing we solve for is financial barriers for patients to gain and stay on expensive drugs.
Gary Prestopino: Okay. So years ago, I’m quoting this because my wife used to sell for Merck. The doctors they would leave, let’s say typical prescription drugs. They would leave samples at a doctor’s office. Is this kind of taking the place of that in a sense of that now the pharmaceuticals have a better way to track where these prescription drugs be it specialty or just normal prescription drugs are going?
Matt Turner: So yes, and no. The genesis of where all this started was on the sample side. And interestingly enough if you go back in PaySign’s history back to the 3P days, there’s running a very large sample program for a schedule 2 ADHD drug. And it was because it was pretty dangerous to have a sales rep driving around with a carton full of schedule 2 drugs in the back of their taurus popping up to a doctor’s office. So they came out with cards to utilize the pharmacy network to essentially be able to get these schedule 2 drugs in the hands of the people who needed them. Then everybody kind of started to figure out, “oh, well, hey we can start buying down the cost in other areas.” And then the Affordable Care Act gets passed and now everybody not everybody, but a good chunk of Americans now has health insurance, and they have co-pays and deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums and so they started utilizing coupons to offset that.
There are some specific examples where samples have been replaced but it is not the most common type of co-pay program, right? I would say it’s probably less than 10% to 15% of all the available co-pay programs out. Are what we call voucher products, which would be like a sample or first fill type product. And it’s mainly because of the expense, right? If you leave a sample in a doctor’s office, you’re out the cost of producing the pills and the packaging and driving it over there which maybe 5, 10 bucks for a pill or a capsule or something along those lines. If that drug is $800, then you’re going to have to pay the pharmacy $800 for that product. So, there’s a cost differentiator there, so that’s why what we would call vouchers, which is what you’re referring to in the sample scenario, is a much smaller portion of the market.
But we do run several voucher programs that are designed to replace samples and [indiscernible].
Gary Prestopino: Okay. If you look at the market, can you size the market for us in terms of —
Jeff Baker: That’s a great potential revenue.
Matt Turner: Yes, I’m going to let Jeff answer that one, but I can say that we’ve kind of discussed this in the past and I think my initial commentary before getting Jeff and Mark to weigh in here would be that every new-to-market drug almost every new-to-market drug, I don’t say every but almost every new-to-market drug is going to have some kind of a patient affordability program. So if the FDA approves a hundred drugs in 2024 pretty good chance that’s a hundred new programs coming to market. And that grows every year. So and as far as the size, I mean, I don’t know that we can put a number on it, but I’ll let Jeff and Mark jump in here and see if they have a number answer for you.
Jeff Baker: Hey, Gary. We don’t really know how big the market is. We do know it’s bigger than the plasma market the TAM there. It’s kind of complicated because the competitors that we’re winning business from offer other services that we don’t. We’re focused on the payment and claims processing side of it. Where they may be doing other services like getting a drug to market or marketing that drug or whatever. So what we do know is that it is bigger than the plasma TAM which is, around 120 million, hard to guess right now what the patient affordability just on the payments and claims side as a standalone basis is.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from Jon Hickman from Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is now live.
Jon Hickman : Nice quarter guys. Good year. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the competition in the plasma side. Is anything changed there with the refocus from the guys who run the centers?
Mark Newcomer: Not you know, I don’t believe so I mean really what we have going on in that space is, and we’ve seen this over the course of the year is. We’ve seen the cost of money increase. We’ve seen people take more of an approach to bring efficiencies to the way their centers are operating and try to derive more plasma in that manner. Rather than just going out in the like, past days, past years where they would — there was a lot of new center building. I think we’ve seen a focus towards moving away from that and trying to improve the efficiencies of their existing centers. And that’s kind of what I think is going on there.
