Category: Market Design

The CVS/Aetna Deal: The Promise in Data Integration

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Wendy Netter Epstein

Earlier this month, CVS announced plans to buy Aetna— one of the nation’s largest health insurers—in a $69 billion deal.  Aetna and CVS pitched the deal to the public largely on the promise of controlling costs and improving efficiency in their operations, which they say will inhere to the benefit of consumers. The media coverage since the announcement has largely focused on these claims, and in particular, on the question of whether this vertical integration will ultimately lower health care costs for consumers—or increase them.  There are both skeptics  and optimists.  A lot will turn on the effects of integrating Aetna’s insurance with CVS’s pharmacy benefit manager services.

But CVS and Aetna also flag another potential benefit that has garnered less media attention—the promise in combining their data.  CVS CEO Larry Merlo says that “[b]y integrating data across [their] enterprise assets and through the use of predictive analytics,” consumers (and patients) will be better off.  This claim merits more attention.  There are three key ways that Merlo might be right. Read More

The Illusion of Choice in Health Care Consumerism

aobodong 1 Comment

By Aobo Dong

The rhetoric of “choice” has been pervasive in U.S. health care reforms and the consumerist health care culture for a long time. The idea is that giving patients more choices over doctors and insurance plans would increase competition in the industry and consequently improve the quality of health care patients receive. However, Allison Hoffman made a convincing case debunking this seemingly intuitive idea in this week’s HLS health law workshop. She argued that reform efforts aimed at increasing consumer choice often fail to empower patients to make better health care choices, and instead, create a wasteful market bureaucracy that is anathema to free market ideals. Her argument reminds me of one of my earlier blog posts on U.S. drug prices, where I compared insurance companies to the Central Planner in a socialist economy. Indeed, there are ironically many institutions and features in the so-called market-driven U.S. health care system that resemble authoritarian and technocratic practices that are directly against the principles of a laissez-faire health care economy.

I will expand Professor Hoffman’s argument by making a few additional points. First, her presentation discusses a number of revealing ways in which the market-based competition creates a false sense of choice in health care. Even Obamacare, which is supposed to offer patients more choices in the Exchange, fails to transcend the falsity of consumer choice. Most patients do not make the best available choice, even when they’re “nudged” by experts in the decision-making process. I’d like to also point out that even if consumers are capable of making the best choice for themselves, whether by thinking with perfect rationality or by accepting “expert opinions,” the choice they ultimately make could still be suboptimal or even disastrous. To understand why this might be the case, it is important to realize that the target population for Obamacare is the minority of people who do not have adequate employer-sponsored plans. Thus, many people enrolled in Obamacare may not have stable jobs and income levels. Nonetheless, the mechanism that determines how much premium for which one qualifies is predicated on an estimation of that individual’s projected annul earnings – a number that is hard to know in advance for those without stable income levels. Hence, a person who made the “right choice” by selecting a silver plan with only $100 monthly premium after receiving a $900 subsidy to cover a $1,000 plan at the beginning of a year may find herself owing the federal government thousands of dollars at the end of the tax year, if she happens to end up with a much higher income level. Had she known the future outcome, she would have chosen a less expensive plan to begin with, but either choice would be a gamble for her. This arbitrariness must be attended to in future health reforms. Read More

Medical Bills are Open-Price Contracts: A Victory for the Little Guy

crobertson Leave a comment

This blog has often covered the problem of outrageous medical bills, and explored whether patients have a responsibility to pay the balance on charges that are not covered by insurance.  One common pattern is that the patient agrees to pay “all reasonable charges” when they arrive at the emergency room or other provider, and then months later receives an incomprehensible bill for seemingly outrageous amounts.  The costs of the same healthcare can vary wildly from provider to provider, even in the same locale, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason.  (This is a common refrain of Elizabeth Rosenthal’s 2017 book.)

According to very basic contract law, when the agreement between a buyer and seller does not specify the prices to be charged (aka an “open price contract”), the seller may not demand more than a “reasonable” amount.   Years ago, I was involved in nationwide litigation against non-profit hospitals, raising this theory and alleging that their billing practices contradicted their state and federal “charitable” tax exemptions, since they were driving poor people into bankruptcy and foreclosure.  That litigation had a few notable wins, when several hospital systems agreed to adopt explicit charity care policies and stop some of the more egregious practices, such as putting liens on their patients’ houses.  Some of these reforms became an industry standard and then part of the Affordable Care Act.

Overall, however, this litigation was challenging, because courts tended to hold that the reasonableness of each patient’s medical bills had to be litigated individually – often with expert witnesses and comparable data from the healthcare provider and other competitors.  With only a few thousand dollars at stake for each patient, the courts’ refusal to aggregate the litigation left many consumers without an effective recourse to challenge their unreasonable bills. Contingent-fee attorneys tend to look for larger stakes to make their investment of time and expenses worthwhile. Read More

Petrie-Flom Panelists Contribute to new Guiding Framework for Designing and Implementing Serious Illness Programs

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mark Sterling

As part of the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted two convenings on Critical Pathways to Improved Care for Serious Illness.  Through roundtable discussions and working sessions at these convenings, expert panelists reviewed innovative programs designed for the aging population with chronic illnesses, focusing on those with declining function and complex care needs.  These convenings contributed to the development of a framework to guide healthcare providers in developing and scaling programs to deliver high quality care to individuals with serious illness, which is of increased importance given the growth of this population and the development of alternative payment models.  The convenings were held in March and June, and the panelists, agendas, slide decks, and related program materials remain available on the Petrie-Flom website (Session 1 & Session 2).

C-TAC, which collaborates with Petrie-Flom on the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, now has published a Report, Toward a Serious Illness Program Design and Implementation Framework, to help providers develop, replicate, and scale programs across a variety of serious illness populations and settings.  The Report’s Framework provides steps to allow healthcare organizations to assess evidence-based options for each facet of care model design and implementation.  As noted in the Report, the Framework is designed to:

  • Inform serious illness program development, replication, and scaling;
  • Integrate with care model payment design;
  • Inform care model and proforma simulator development;
  • Inform other aspects of design and development such as policy, standardized measurement, and regulatory analysis.

Read More

Drained Swamps and Quackery: Some Thoughts on Efficacy

seanfinan Leave a comment

By Seán Finan

“What makes drug development long and expensive is the need to prove, beyond statistical doubt, that your damn drug works”

Michael Gilman, Biotech Entrepreneur

2017 is going to be terrific. Tremendous, even. Things are going to change, big league.

7770160314_61e7536762_kThe new President has promised fantastic reforms to the drug industry. He’s going to get the big players in the pharmaceutical industry around a table and negotiate huge price reductions. Of course, he’s not going to touch their bottom line. If anything, he’s going to improve it. Innovation is being choked by over-regulation and he’s going remove burdensome FDA hurdles. But he has Executive Orders to give and walls to build, so he’s drafting in the very best people to help. We’re still waiting for those people to be officially named. Meanwhile, the media have had a month and a half of fun and speculation. The volume and variety of names being thrown around make it feel like a food fight at a Chinese buffet. One of those names is Peter Thiel.

Read More

An Alternative Point of View: The Societal Benefits of the Amgen v. Regeneron Injunction

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Special Guest Post by Beau H. Miller, Jefferies

This article was originally published as part of research issued by the Jefferies Biotechnology Equity Research group.

Since the Amgen v. Regeneron ruling that resulted in Judge Robinson of the District Court of Delaware granting a permanent injunction removing Regeneron’s Praluent from the market (pending appeal), there have been a number of media and twitter commentaries providing their insights on the case.

These reactions have overall been of the opinion that it is a “shocking” precedent for a judge to remove an FDA-approved drug from the market for patent infringement – a remedy which patent owners, even pharmaceutical manufacturers, are justly able to obtain under the circumstances outlined in eBay v. MercExchange.

Given this, there are a few facts that have been overlooked in these reviews that lead us to disagree with some of the conclusions they reach, and also which led us to anticipate an injunction in this case. Read More

Preventing a post-antibiotic world

koutterson Leave a comment

By Kevin Outterson

Nick Bagley and I have an op-ed in today’s New York Times calling for serious economic incentives for antibiotics, delinking revenues from sales volumes with a $4 billion prize system.

From the piece:

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a disturbing report about the death of an elderly woman in Washoe County, Nev. What killed her wasn’t heart disease, cancer or pneumonia. What killed her were bacteria that were resistant to every antibiotic doctors could throw at them.

This anonymous woman is only the latest casualty in a war against antibiotic-resistant bacteria — a war that we are losing. Although most bacteria die when they encounter an antibiotic, a few hardy bugs survive. Through repeated exposure, those tough bacteria proliferate, spreading resistance genes through the bacterial population. That’s the curse of antibiotics: The more they’re used, the worse they get, especially when they’re used carelessly. […]

Read more here.

Health Insurance, Veterinary Care, and the Not-So-Secret Benefits of Pets

sthomas 1 Comment

By Shailin Thomas

Pet ownership is incredibly popular in the United States. There are almost 70 million companion dogs spread across 43 million American households.   This isn’t particularly surprising, given that study after study has shown that companion animals promote healthier, happier, longer lives for their owners. Despite pet popularity and prevalence, though, many pet owners don’t fully understand how expensive their four-legged family members can be — especially if they end up needing extensive veterinary care. Every year, millions of companion animals are euthanized because their owners lack the financial resources to pay for necessary veterinary services. Unlike in human medicine, pets in the hospital with readily curable ailments often go untreated for financial reasons.

How can we help people keep and care for their pets — capturing companion animal health benefits while also ensuring those pets receive the veterinary care they need? The answer might be found in the synergies between animal and human health — and the benefits they entail for health insurance providers.

The health benefits of companion animals have been extensively documented in both the scientific literature and the mainstream media. Pet owners have, inter alia, decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, decreased risk of anxiety and depression, decreased incidence of allergies, and increased immune system function. Some insurance companies even have materials for their customers promoting pet ownership because of these benefits. The health conditions ameliorated by animal companionship are often otherwise treated with doctor’s visits, medications, and other expensive interventions paid for in large part by insurance providers. In other words, pet ownership produces positive externalities on insurance providers by decreasing the amount they pay in traditional medical services for these ailments — and insurance companies have an interest in incentivizing animal companionship.

Read More

Ambulances are Monopolies — and They Should Be Regulated Accordingly

sthomas Leave a comment

By Shailin Thomas

You go to your local urgent care with a headache and a fever, and the doctor suggests a trip to the hospital for further evaluation — just to make sure there isn’t anything serious causing your symptoms. She offers an ambulance, and you accept. You could probably walk or Uber, but you’re not feeling well, and the doctor has offered to arrange the ride. Why not?

This was the story of Joanne Freedman. She didn’t think too much about it, until she received a $900 bill for the two-block ambulance ride she took to the hospital. While Joanne’s experience was particularly egregious, it is not wholly uncommon. Ambulance pricing is one of the most variable and least transparent components of health care costs, with rides ranging from tens to thousands of dollars. This is in part because there are many ambulance providers, and they all have different relationships with different insurance companies. It’s also in part because ambulance rates are generally set according to the services the ambulance is equipped to provide, not necessarily the services actually provided. Some ambulance companies have contracts with municipalities that make them the only game in town, while others are in more diverse markets with multiple providers competing for patients. All this combines to create an incredibly complex industry with very little consistency from ambulance to ambulance.

But is this disjointed, free-market system the best way to structure emergency transportation? The arguments underlying the justification of a free, unregulated market hinge on the ability of consumers to police the industry through choice. If the seller of a good sets the price too high, consumers will buy from a different seller until she brings the price down to what consumers are willing to pay.  This is, in theory, what allows markets to find the right prices for goods and services more efficiently than any government agency or regulator ever could. Read More

Drug Pricing, Shame, and Shortages

W. Nicholson Price Leave a comment

By Nicholson Price

Drug prices have been making waves in the news recently.  The most recent case is the huge price hikes of the EpiPen, which provides potentially life-saving automatic epinephrine injections to those with severe allergies.  Mylan, which makes the EpiPen, has raised its price some 450% over the last several years.  The EpiPen is a particularly problematic—and media-friendly—story because the emblematic use case is the kid in school who can’t breathe because she came into contact with peanuts.  Jacking up the price on something that’s not optional—for parents and for schools—seems heartless.  Thoughtful pieces have pointed out how the EpiPen price increases demonstrate problems with our health care system and drug/device approval system in general.

Other big recent cases that have hit the news include huge increases in the price of insulin, and, of course, Turing Pharmaceuticals’/Martin Shkreli’s ~5000% price hike on the drug Daraprim.  The EpiPen and Daraprim are especially notable because patents mostly aren’t involved—the effective monopoly appears to come from the delay or challenge in getting generic products approved by FDA (although the EpiPen itself also seems tough to make).  And, of course, drug prices aren’t regulated in the US the way they are in much of the world.

These stories seem crazy, cruel, and fascinating.  And they raise (for me, anyway) the question: what’s changed?  This seems like a relatively new phenomenon.  But FDA’s had a backlog for a while, and drug prices have long been unregulated. Read More