NHPC 2016: Provider Engagement Can Unify Diverse Payment Reform Efforts

By Cornelia Hall, Master of Public Policy Candidate, Harvard Kennedy School, Class of 2017

This is the first entry in a three-part series on the AcademyHealth National Health Policy Conference, held in Washington, DC, on February 1-2, 2016. 

At AcademyHealth’s 2016 National Health Policy Conference earlier this month, payment reform was a pervasive theme.  Its prominence was not surprising.  Indeed, in early 2015, HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced the agency’s goal to have 30% of traditional, fee-for-service Medicare payments tied to quality or value through alternative payment models by the end of 2016, and 50% by the end of 2018.  As the current sea change in health care moves the system towards these goals, the conference’s panelists explored various aspects of the transition to value-based payment. Speakers who discussed the issue included leaders in government, clinical practice, and private insurance.  They sent an overarching message that payment reform efforts will continue to take a variety of forms — on parallel tracks with cross-cutting themes — rather than a single approach.  Representatives from provider organizations particularly stressed the necessary groundwork for these efforts to be effective.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) under the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is operating dozens of payment- and quality-focused models and demonstrations across the country.  The breadth of payment models and their varying degrees of success represent different approaches to health care reform, such as population- and episode-based payment.  On his panel, CMMI Deputy Director Dr. Rahul Rajkumar noted that this breadth is designed to appeal to diverse providers that differ in type and readiness for payment reform.  Indeed, a health care system that has operated for decades with multiple payers, little care coordination, fragmented use of technology, and inconsistent definitions of quality care is undergoing monumental transformation.  The transition from fee-for-service to value-based payment thus involves some experimentation to identify the most effective approach. Read More

Update: Another Wave of ICD Settlements

By Zack Buck

There has been an update to a story I recently blogged about here.

As announced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday, another 51 hospitals have settled allegations that the hospitals placed implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) in the chests of patients without complying with Medicare’s mandatory waiting periods.  These 51 settlements amount to $23 million, meaning that the DOJ’s ICD review has now has resulted in settlements with more than 500 hospitals totaling more than $280 million.

According to the DOJ, this is the final stage of the investigation, concluding an initiative that has highlighted the tension that exists between fraud enforcement, medical necessity, and reimbursement standards (recent articles here, here, and here).

President Obama Introduces Evidence Generation Strategy to Reduce High Drug Costs

By Elizabeth Guo

Addressing the high cost of drugs was at the top of President Obama’s list in his fiscal year 2017 budget, released last week. Many of his proposals were familiar. The President hoped to increase manufacturer contributions to prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D and wanted to shorten the length of biologic market exclusivity from twelve to seven years. These proposals were also in the President’s fiscal year 2016 budget but were not put into place.

However, the budget also included a number of surprising, new proposals that underscore how post-market evidence might play an increasing role in controlling drug prices in coming years. Rachel Sachs has written about the role that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) can play in keeping down drug prices, and it seems like some of these ideas are gaining traction:

Modify reimbursement of Part B drugs. The White House estimates that changes to Medicare Part B payments could save the country $7.75 billion over ten years. Medicare Part B covers drugs and services dispensed in an outpatient setting. Many of the most expensive biologic drugs are currently covered under Medicare Part B. The budget proposal did not elaborate on how the White House hopes to change Part B payments, but the proposal likely refers to recommendations released by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) last June. MedPAC’s 2015 report recommended that Congress link Part B payments to clinical effectiveness evidence. For example, the government could group drugs with similar health effects and pay all drugs in each group the rate of least costly product in the group. This approach relies on having reliable clinical effectiveness data so that researchers can easily compare the relative effectiveness of two or more drugs. Read More

Happy New Year: From “Weltschmerz” to Pharmaceutical Innovation

By Timo Minssen

Dear readers and colleagues,

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy, healthy and peaceful year 2016.

Reaching the end of 2015, I cannot stop thinking about the year that has passed. Being a native German, living in Sweden and commuting every week over the bridge to Copenhagen in Denmark – most recently with thousands of terrified refugees and border controls on the way back to Sweden – this year has left me with much astonishment and concern about the state of the European Union and our global situation. It appears to me as if the EU and other global leaders have focused far too much on tiny technicalities, while leaving the bigger issues untouched and disregarding crucial lessons of history. There are so many things that we must learn from 2015’s terrible events and alarming decisions, but also from the hope-giving agreements, incidents and initiatives. For me one of the most important take-aways is that everything is connected and that sustainable, realistic solutions not only require immediate actions. In my view, we need to think about long-term strategies both in more detail and from a bigger perspective. Due to the complexity of our most pressing problems this is a colossal task. It demands more knowledge, better communications, more collaboration and a more effective coordination of  the considerable skills and different competences that are already out there.

Returning to the actual topic of this blog, it becomes evident that this is also very much true for the health sector and the bio-pharmaceutical area. Not only the Ebola outbreakglobal health crises, IPR debates, dreadful business models and controversial FTA negotiations, but also scientific break troughs, new therapies, legislative action and novel US and EU approaches demonstrate very clearly how this area is left with many challenges and opportunities. The recently approved US 21st Century Cures Act and the new EU Clinical Trials Regulation, for example, show how legislative activities pursuing laudable goals might lead to unwanted adverse effects if they are not carefully enough considered. Read More

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Physician Coverage under the ACA

By Elizabeth Guo

A recent study in JAMA by Dorner, Jacobs, and Sommers released some good and bad news about provider coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The study examined whether health plans offered on the federal marketplace in 34 states offered a sufficient number of physicians in nine specialties. For each plan, the authors searched for the number of providers covered under each specialty in each state’s most populous county. Plans without specialist physicians were labeled specialist-deficient plans. The good: roughly 90% of the plans covered more than five providers in each specialty. The bad: 19 plans were specialist-deficient and 9 of 34 states had at least one specialty deficient plan. Endocrinology, psychiatry, and rheumatology were the most commonly excluded specialties.

Here’s where it gets ugly.

Excluding certain specialists from coverage can be a way for insurers to discriminate against individuals with certain conditions by excluding them from their plans. By excluding rheumatologists, insurers may prevent enrolling individuals with rheumatoid arthritis; by excluding endocrinologists, insurers may prevent enrolling individuals with diabetes. Individuals with chronic conditions need to see specialists more frequently than healthier adults, and how easily a patient with chronic conditions can see a specialist can affect his health care outcomes.

The study adds to the growing body of empirical research showing that even after the ACA, insurers may be structuring their plans to potentially discriminate against individuals with significant chronic conditions. In January, Jacobs and Sommers published a study showing that some plans were discriminating against patients with HIV/AIDS through adverse tiering by placing all branded and generic HIV/AIDS drugs on the highest formulary tier. Another study found that 86% of plans place all medicines in at least one class on the highest cost-sharing tier. These studies show that despite being on a health plan, individuals with certain chronic conditions may still have trouble accessing essential treatments and services. Read More

Our Curious Medicare Vaccine Reimbursement System

By George Maliha, Harvard Health Law Society

As flu season begins, we are bombarded by ubiquitous reminders to get our flu shot. So, it is a good opportunity to reflect on how we provide vaccines to our fellow citizens 65 and older. By law, Medicare Part B covers 4 preventive vaccines (flu, two pneumococcal, and hepatitis B for medium-to high-risk patients). Part D picks up the rest, namely shingles, TDaP, and any other commercially available vaccine. But, that’s where the trouble begins.

When Congress passed Part D, the vaccines recommended for those 65 or older were basically covered by Part B. Now, they aren’t. In 2006, the zoster (or shingles) vaccine came onto the market. In 2010, the recommendations for the TDaP (the P for pertussis or whooping cough being the most relevant here) changed to include the elderly.

But, so what, they’re still covered, right? Read More

Clarity for an “Unforgiving” and “Potentially Unworkable” Rule

By Zack Buck

In a case previously blogged about here, last week, the Southern District of New York denied Defendants’ motion to dismiss in U.S. ex rel. Kane v. Continuum Health Partners, No. 11-2325, in a major decision for health care entities unclear on the parameters of overpayment liability under the False Claims Act (FCA).

The case centers on Continuum Health Partners, Inc. (Continuum)—which operated three New York City area hospitals—and its erroneous receipt of overpayments from the New York Medicaid program based on a software glitch. The overpayments began in 2009; by September 2010, the New York State Comptroller had notified Continuum. Continuum tapped Robert Kane, an employee, to review the billing data and identify all claims that were incorrect. On February 4, 2011, Kane emailed a spreadsheet to superiors that contained 900 claims that may have been erroneously billed. The spreadsheet was “overly inclusive” and “approximately half of the claims listed therein were never actually overpaid.” On February 8, Kane was terminated.

Read More

How to Fix Our Hospital Pricing Problem (and How Not To)

Guest post by Erin Fuse Brown
[Cross-posted from Center for Law, Health and Society Blog]

Last month, Slate columnist Reihan Salam wrote a provocative article about outrageous hospital prices that are driven, according to Salam, by greed, avarice, and market power. Salam gets a few things dead right, namely his diagnosis that we have a massive hospital pricing problem that is bleeding us dry and that the problem is largely caused by growing hospital market power. However, he misses the mark when laying out policy recommendations to curb monopoly-driven hospital prices.

The solutions

Antitrust:  Salam favors using antitrust enforcement to prevent health care consolidation and to reduce barriers to entry for competition. The biggest problem with antitrust enforcement is that it can do little to reverse or break up existing monopolies. Antitrust laws will be unable to help the vast majority of hospital markets that are already concentrated. Second, even with its improving success rate in court, the FTC simply cannot prevent or police the ongoing wave of hospital mergers, resulting in price increases up to 40% price increases in some areas. To be sure, increased antitrust enforcement is a necessary element of the strategy to control hospital prices to stem the tide of consolidation that is driving prices upward. But antitrust is no silver bullet, especially for hospital markets that have already become noncompetitive. Read More

Monday 4/13 HLS Health Law Workshop with Rachel Sachs

HLS Health Law Workshop: Rachel Sachs

April 13, 2015 5:00 PM
Griswold Hall, Room 110 (Harvard Law School)
1525 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA [Map here.]

Presentation Title: “Rethinking the Incentives/Access Dichotomy: Prescription Drug Reimbursement as Innovation Incentive.” This paper is not available for download. To request a copy in preparation for the workshop, please contact Jennifer Minnich at jminnich@law.harvard.edu.

Rachel E. Sachs is an Academic Fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center. She earned her J.D. in 2013 magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review and a student fellow with both the Petrie-Flom Center and the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business. Rachel has also earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, during which she interned at the United States Department of Health and Human Services. She holds an A.B. in Bioethics from Princeton University. After law school Rachel clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Rachel’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of patent law and public health, with a particular focus on problems of innovation and access and the ways in which law helps or hinders these problems. Her past scholarship has examined the interactions between patent law and FDA regulation in the area of diagnostic tests, and explored the mechanisms behind the passage of patent-related legislation. Her current scholarship applies this focus on innovation and access to the intersection of patent law and drug reimbursement policies.

 

Highlights from the 21st Century Cures Act

By Rachel Sachs

At the end of January, the House Energy & Commerce Committee released a discussion draft of the 21st Century Cures Act.  This document marks the beginning of the legislative phase of the 21st Century Cures Initiative, during which the Committee has held numerous roundtables and hearings and issued several white papers.  The first discussion draft of the Act, clocking in at nearly 400 pages (even with several sections “to be supplied”), is incredibly wide-ranging, including proposals that could affect every stage of the innovation process.

The discussion draft should be of interest to everyone in the health policy field.  One series of proposals is targeted at the NIH, including more support for the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and for the NIH’s BRAIN initiative.  Another set would act on the FDA, including one provision giving new drugs for unmet medical needs the option of 15 years of exclusivity.  This provision, based on the MODDERN Cures Act, is particularly likely to inspire a great deal of controversy and opposition.  The draft also contains a series of proposals designed to promote the development of new antibiotics, in keeping with President Obama’s recent focus on this issue.  Its attention to the use of social media by drug companies and to the FDA’s regulation of health-related software will be of interest to many, as well.

The proposed draft is much too long to catalog fully in this brief blog post, although those who are interested in a broader summary might enjoy the 13-page summary of the Act put out by the Committee, the Science summary by Kelly Servick and Jocelyn Kaiser, or Alexander Gaffney’s comprehensive Regulatory Explainer.  But I do want to highlight one section of the draft which deserves more attention than it has gotten: section 2021, which would create a national Medical Product Innovation Advisory Commission.

Read More