National Survey Suggests that Off-Label Status is Material to Informed Consent

By Christopher Robertson

As many readers of this blog know, the FDA requires that, prior to entering the market, companies prove safety and efficacy for each intended use of their products, but physicians are then free to prescribe the products for any other uses.  (Companies are not allowed to promote off-label uses however.)

A recent national survey by Consumer Reports includes two interesting findings:

  1. About two-thirds (63%) of Americans “would not take a doctor prescribed medication that has been approved by the FDA, but not for their specific condition.”
  2. Almost all Americans (94%) “say they have never been told by a physician that a medication they were taking was not approved by the FDA for their condition.”

Patients are right to be skeptical of off-label uses, though they may not appreciate just how common they are.  In fact, most off-label use is unsupported by scientific evidence as to safety and efficacy.  A new report by the FDA illustrates several off-label uses that were subjected to rigorous clinical trials and turned out to be ineffective or dangerous.   For example, Aliskiren is approved for treatment of hypertension and was used off-label for prevention of congestive heart failure (CHF) complications.  A large trial showed that, although it did not significantly improve CHF mortality, it did significantly increase rates of kidney failure for CHF patients.  We do not know how many other off-label uses would fail if similarly tested.   Read More

The ACA’s Real Effect: Moving the Goalposts

By Christopher Robertson

“I believe and I look forward to working with you to make certain that every single American has access to the highest-quality care and coverage that is possible. … [W]e believe it’s appropriate to put in place a system that gives every person the financial feasibility to be able to purchase the coverage that they want for themselves and for their family.”

That quote is not from Barack Obama.  It’s from Trump HHS nominee Tom Price, and it shows just how successfully the ACA has shifted the American political landscape towards universal coverage. As I argued earlier this month in STAT, with Glenn Cohen and Holly Fernandez Lynch, the debate is now about how to get universal health insurance coverage, rather than whether to do so.

Republicans will of course favor market-oriented approaches, and they will find difficulty conceiving a plan that is farther to the right than the ACA itself while actually achieving the goals that Price promises.  But for now, even if the ACA is soon repealed, it has succeeded in moving the goalposts for health policy.

Income-Scaling of Cost-Sharing Gains Traction

By Christopher Robertson

With 148,000 members, the American College of Physicians (ACP) is the largest medical-speciality organization.  This summer, its board released a new report on the growing financial burdens faced by patients who enjoy health insurance but are nonetheless exposed to unbearably large costs for healthcare.  At the end of the day, cost-sharing is just the absence of insurance for those costs.

ACP calls for a range of reforms, including “income-adjusted cost-sharing approaches that reduce or directly subsidize the expected out-of-pocket contribution of lower-income workers to avoid creating a barrier to their obtaining needed care.”  As I have argued, the Affordable Care Act includes income-based subsidies for cost-sharing in the Marketplaces, but these are currently being challenged in court, and do not apply to the employer-based system or Medicare, which together cover the vast majority of patients.

Hillary Clinton has also advanced a plan to create progressive refundable tax credits for people who spend more than 5% of their income out-of-pocket.   The advantage of such a tax-based approach is that it reaches patients regardless of where they get their insurance (except for Medicare, which is excluded).  The disadvantage is that it leaves people in a state of financial insecurity until they get their refunds.  A better approach would scale cost-sharing exposure in the first place, a power that I have suggested is already available under Federal law and which is self-funding.

Fighting the Next Pandemic: Airline Vaccine Screens

By Christopher Robertson

Whether it is Ebola, H1N1, the season flu, or the next nasty bug that we cannot yet even imagine, if we wanted to efficiently spread the disease, one could not do much better than packing several Flight routeshundred people into a cylinder for a few hours, while they eat, drink, defecate, and urinate.  Even more, to make sure that the disease cannot be contained in a particular locality, we could build thousands of those cylinders and move them rapidly from one place to another worldwide, remix the people, and put them back in the cylinders for return trips back to their homes, schools, and jobs.

We are (hopefully) not going to stop airline travel.  But we can make it a lot safer, by ensuring that almost everyone who boards these flights is vaccinated.  That’s the thesis of a new paper out this week.

Airlines carry two million people every day.  And, prior research has shown that airline travel is a vector of disease.  In fact, when the September 11 attacks caused airline travel to fall, seasonal flu diagnoses fell too.

The threat of pandemics is quite real, and more generally, the mortality and morbidity associated with infectious disease is a severe public health burden.  About 42,000 adults and 300 children die every year from vaccine-preventable disease.  New vaccines are on the horizon.

Arguably, airlines have market-based and liability-based reasons to begin screening passengers, whether for vaccinations generally or for particular ones during an outbreak.  Although the states have traditionally exercised the plenary power to mandate vaccinations, and have primarily focused on children in schools, the U.S. federal government also has substantial untapped power to regulate in this domain as well.

Recent Developments in Off-Label Promotion

By Chris Robertson

July has been a busy month for those following the controversy around off-label promotion of drugs and devices.  As many on this blog know, federal law requires that prior to marketing any drug or device, companies must prove to the FDA’s satisfaction that it is safe and effective for all intended uses.  If the company reveals that it intends unapproved uses,  sales of the drug or device are illegal.  Nonetheless, physicians can prescribe “off-label,” and companies are free to sell for those known-but-not-intended purposes.

This carefully-wrought policy may seem convoluted, but it serves important epistemic and economic purposes, as I have argued elsewhere.  This month, I have a new draft paper on SSRN, assessing recent assertions of a First Amendment right to promote for uses not approved by the FDA, and consider whether such a right would be equally applicable to drugs that have no FDA-approved label at all. I worry that the entire pre-market approval regime may be at stake. Feedback on that intentionally-provocative analysis is quite welcome.

On Wednesday, two medical device company executives, were convicted of promoting a product “to deliver steroid medications to patients’ sinuses, though it was only approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for keeping sinuses open.”  The prosecutors thought the case was particularly egregious, because the company had intended the broader use to deliver medicine all along, but sought to mislead the FDA, denying it the chance review the safety and efficacy of the real intended use.  The jury instructions and verdict form  are particularly interesting, to see how the government’s trial strategy avoids the holding of a Second Circuit case of Caronia, which overturned a conviction on First Amendment grounds.  I’ll return with some analysis later. Read More

Bill Sage Webcast on Health Law v. Health Policy

As part of the Regulatory Science series at University of Arizona:
Health Law and Health Policy: A Frictional Account
William M. Sage, MD, JD, University of Texas
Today 12/2 — Noon (AZ Time) / 2pm Eastern / 11am Pacific
The talk will be webcast live, and available as an archive:

https://streaming.biocom.arizona.edu/event/index.cfm?id=26074

Participants in the live webcast will have the opportunity submit questions and comments.  Please do!

10/14: Webcast on the NIH’s Efforts to Support Translational Science

This month’s Regulatory Science Series presentation features Dr. Keith Joiner, MD, MPH, the Director of the Center for Management Innovations in Health Care at the Eller College of Management, and former Dean of the University of Arizona College of Medicine. He will present on NIH Efforts to Support Translational Science and discuss the importance of government funding policy to the regulatory science endeavor.

This event will stream live at 12:00 PM MT on Wednesday, October 14, 2015, at:  https://streaming.biocom.arizona.edu/event/index.cfm?id=26072.

The University of Arizona Regulatory Science Program is a partnership with the James E. Rogers College of Law and University of Arizona Health Sciences.

Wednesday Webcast: “Gene Patenting, Innovation Incentives, and the Future of Intellectual Property” by Derek Bambauer

By Christopher Robertson

This week, my colleague Derek Bambauer will speak as part of the Regulatory Science series at the University of Arizona.  Free CLE attendance form and readings are available.

Tune in at 12:00pm (Pacific) / 3:00pm (Eastern) on Wed Sept 16.

https://streaming.biocom.arizona.edu/event/?id=26071

The talk will also be archived at the same link.

New DTCA Guidance — Enough to Empower Consumers?

Bill of Health contributor Christopher T. Robertson has a new Op-Ed out in the New England Journal of Medicine:

As one of only two countries that permit direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals, the United States tasks the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with regulating that advertising to ensure that it doesn’t mislead consumers. When a drug maker publishes or broadcasts a claim that its drug has benefits in a particular disease, the FDA requires it to include information on the product’s risks as well. Since it’s not feasible for companies to include all the important information about their products in a television ad, the FDA requires them to refer viewers to more complete information, such as that in a printed magazine ad. Companies have tended to comply with this requirement by supplementing colorful, persuasive ads with one or two pages of dry text providing the required disclosures, often simply using language that the FDA has approved for other purposes, such as package inserts for prescribers. But research shows that most patients who attempt to read these disclosures find them difficult to understand, and many don’t even try to make sense of them.1 Now, the FDA is in the process of adjusting its DTCA rules, aiming to provide greater assurance that patients receive due warning of the most significant risks — but its tweaks probably don’t go far enough to really empower consumers to make smart decisions about the drugs they put into their bodies. […]

Read the full article here.