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The Ongoing Step Therapy Debate

By Laura Karas

Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) reintroduction this February of a federal bill, the Safe Step Act, has revived the debate over the prudence of step therapy protocols.

Step therapy is an insurer utilization-management tool imposed in response to high drug prices. As its name implies, step therapy requires “steps” before a patient can receive his preferred medication (i.e., the one his provider has prescribed). Typically, a patient must “try and fail” a less costly medication or series of medications before becoming eligible for insurance coverage of the medication in question. In effect, step therapy allows an insurer’s “preferred therapy” to supersede patient and provider preference.

The need for step therapy is closely bound to the problem of high drug prices. But the crux of the step therapy debate boils down to the following: Who should decide which pharmaceutical drugs your health plan covers? You and your doctor, or your insurer?

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shopping trolley with medicine

Step therapy explained: An increasingly popular tool for cost control

News that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will allow Medicare Advantage programs to enact “step therapy” programs for drugs under Part B as part of an effort to combat rising drug prices has been making rounds in the health policy world recently.

Step therapy is used by all major private insurers and is aimed at curbing expenditures on expensive drugs. It requires that a patient to try a less expensive alternative treatment. Those who fail treatment with the less expensive drug would then be eligible for coverage of the more expensive treatment. Note that it is very similar to prior authorization, a ubiquitous policy tool in which a drug is approved for coverage only after ensuring certain clinical criteria are met.

What was once a relatively rare tool is now commonly used. I examined UnitedHealthcare’s list of step therapy drugs and there are now over 100 listings. This is an order of magnitude increase from the number of drugs listed just four years ago, when I first got interested in this issue.

Drugs listed for step therapy tend to be either new, extremely expensive therapies (e.g., 3rd-line biologics for rheumatoid arthritis, sofosbuvir for hepatitis C) or more expensive formulations of common drugs (e.g., extended release formulation of quetiapine).

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