Category: Reimbursement

Managing Off-Label Drug Use

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Guest Post by Marc Rodwin

Last year Endo Pharmaceuticals paid just under $182 million to settle a Department of Justice prosecution over its illegal marketing of Lidoderm for uses that the FDA had not approved.[1]  This settlement reflects a widespread practice in which pharmaceutical firms illegally promote drugs for off-label uses. In recent years, pharmaceutical firm settlement agreements for off-label promotion have included Johnson and Johnson ($2.2 billion for off-label promotion of Risperdal, Invega and Natrecor);[2] Pfizer ($2.3 billion for off-label promotion of Bextra);[3] and GlaxoSmith Kline ($3 billion for off-label promotion of Avandia).[4]  However, the problem of off-label drug use is more complex than it appears.

Manufacturers are prohibited from marketing drugs off-label, that is, for purposes that the FDA has not found to be safe and effective. However, physicians may prescribe drugs off-label for a different therapeutic purpose, with a different dose or for a different category of patients than that on which the drug was tested. Physicians—with the manufacturer’s encouragement—prescribe off-label much more frequently than is justifiable and risk harming their patients. In fact, 70 percent of off-label uses lack significant scientific support.

Physicians value the right to prescribe off-label, but it is the pharmaceutical firms’ incentive to increase sales that drives this practice. More sales means increased profits, so manufacturers have financial incentives to promote off-label use. The First Amendment protects certain off-label promotion as commercial free speech. Furthermore, manufacturers sometimes engage in illegal off-label promotion when the expected revenue exceeds potential penalties.

Unmanaged off-label drug use compromises good medical practice and the FDA’s ability to protect consumers from unsafe and ineffective drugs. Yet typical reform proposals, such as stronger sanctions for illegal promotion, don’t eliminate the problem. Public policy should manage off-label drug use by tracking off-label prescribing, removing economic incentives to sell off-label, and evaluating the safety and effectiveness of off-label uses.

Read More

“Volume to Value” Still Needs an Ethics Consult

kelseyberry Leave a comment

By Kelsey Berry

Whereas “allocation of scarce resources” is a buzz phrase that inspires a great deal of distress and desire for good ethical argument, “waste avoidance” strikes us as a relatively uncontroversial method for containing health care spending. Perhaps this is because rationing implies a trade-off between two individuals, each of whom have the potential to benefit from a possible intervention, whereas waste avoidance, on the other hand, implies a trade-off between two services – one of which has the capacity to benefit an individual, and the other which does not. Surely the latter trade-off is preferable, and perhaps even imperative, to make before we take up the former. This week U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell signaled a commitment to making the latter trade-off in her announcement on a complex area of health care financing: Medicare payment & payment reform. Medicare payment is one of the few levers that the federal government has relatively direct control over when it comes to controlling health care spending, and Burwell’s announcement was a welcome change in the policy discourse from the oft-lamented “doc fix”/SGR debacle (a fix for which was just bypassed again).

In her announcement and this perspectives piece in NEJM, Burwell set goals to (1) move 50% of Medicare payments to alternative payment models such as Alternative Care Organizations (ACOs) and bundled payment arrangements by 2018, and (2) tie 90% of all Medicare payments made under the traditional fee-for-service model to quality or value, through programs such as the Hospital Value Based Purchasing and the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Programs, by 2018. Notably, these are the first explicit goals for transitioning to alternative payment models and value-based payments that have been set in the history of the Medicare program – though it remains to be seen how these goals will be pursued.

Read More

The People of the State of New York v. Actavis: Making a Hard-Switch Procompetitive

rabbott Leave a comment

By Ryan Abbott

Actavis is back in the spotlight regarding its allegedly anticompetitive behavior. Last month, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued an injunction against Actavis and its subsidiary, Forest Laboratories LLC based on the New York Attorney General’s “product hopping” suit.

The suit concerns Actavis’ attempt to extend monopoly protection for its drug Namenda. Namenda is one of only a few FDA approved drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, and the only approved drug in a class of medications that act on the glutamatergic system by blocking NMDA receptors. Namenda is also Actavis’ largest revenue generating drug; it brought in $1.5 billion in sales last year. Unfortunately for Actavis, Namenda’s patent protection is due to expire in 2015. Once the patent protection for Namenda has expired, Actavis should ordinarily expect to see a dramatic reduction in sales revenue, as much as 90% in the first year, as consumers switch to a lower-cost generic version.

Read More

Against Hearings in Medicare?

mlawrence Leave a comment

As the backlog of Medicare appeals indicates, Medicare claimants are seeking many more hearings than we can currently provide. The mismatch makes a fundamental question particularly acute: Why do we hold hearings to review Medicare coverage decisions in the first place?

It’s a question worth asking. The Affordable Care Act mandated that denials of private health insurance coverage be reviewed by external, contract medical specialists, without a hearing. (See here.) If we are comfortable with private, sometimes profit-motivated coverage decisions obtaining external review review by someone other than an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), without a hearing, why do we feel differently about Medicare coverage decisions? Read More

Upcoming Medicare Forum on Appeals Backlog, Posts

mlawrence Leave a comment

Next week (on October 29) Medicare’s Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals (OMHA) is holding another appellant forum to discuss the ongoing backlog of Medicare claims waiting for a hearing.  In one sense, a lot has happened since the last forum in February (I covered that here): OMHA announced pilot projects to try statistical sampling and facilitated settlement in some cases (see here and here); CMS (effectively the “defendant” for settlement purposes in these appeals; functionally independent from OMHA) announced a willingness to settle a subset of pending inpatient hospital billing claims for 68 cents on the dollar (see Nick Bagley’s post at the incidental economist); the backlog came up at a couple congressional hearings; and two lawsuits were filed to challenge it, one by providers (see here) and another by beneficiaries (see here).

In another sense, not that much has happened. Unless Thursday’s forum brings big news—and I know that OMHA and CMS have been working hard on reforms so perhaps it will—there is still a big backlog of Medicare appeals, there is still not a resource fix in sight, and the influx of Medicare appeals seems to still far outstrip OMHA’s capacity to hold hearings.

In advance of the forum, I’m planning a series of posts offering my thoughts, such as they are, on where we are and where we are going. I invite anyone who disagrees or thinks I’ve gotten something wrong to post their own views in the comments. Or you can email me and I will look into sharing your thoughts as an independent posting. You can get all my posts on this subject, including new ones as they come in, by clicking here.

A caveat: I’m approaching these as blog posts—trying to get my educated thoughts based on everything I have read out in a timely way—but I might be missing something. If the upcoming forum or comments reveal that I am–I won’t be there in person but will be watching remotely–I will either post a general update or go add particular updates in the text of my posts as necessary.

And a disclosure: I’ve said this before but want to do it once more again before pontificating—I worked in government until a little over a year ago, so my views on these matters may be biased. (And of course I will not discuss anything I worked on.)  But I’ve done my best to be objective.

Surprise! The Doctors at Your In-Network Hospital Are Out-of-Network

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Guest Post by Erin C. Fuse Brown

Nick Bagley has written a great post at the Incidental Economist responding to Elisabeth Rosenthal’s recent article in the NY Times on out-of-network emergency physician billing.  This phenomenon arises when a patient goes to an in-network hospital, but the physicians staffing the emergency room are out-of-network. As a result, patients get balance-billed by the out-of-network physicians for large amounts that are not subject to their deductible or out-of-pocket limits.  I wanted to pile on to the moral outrage and add some thoughts about legal solutions.

(1)   DOL and HHS should issue rules to include out-of-network physician services provided at an in-network facility (not just emergency rooms) in calculations of an individual’s out-of-pocket maximum.

Nick suggests that the Department of Labor require out-of-network emergency services to count toward the ACA’s out-of-pocket spending cap. HHS should do the same for plans sold on the Exchange. Emergency rooms are an easy target, because in an emergency most people have little choice but to go to the nearest ER or the one to which the ambulance delivers them. My 2-year old fell and hit her head when we were traveling out of town, and I can personally attest to the difficulty of trying to figure out whether the nearest ER is in-network even for a law professor who writes about the perils of balance billing.

However, the out-of-network doctor problem goes beyond emergency care. Even for non-emergencies, you could dutifully select an in-network hospital and in-network surgeon to perform your hip replacement or bypass surgery, but the anesthesiologist or the other physicians working on you may be out-of-network, and you would be stuck with a large out-of-network charge. So the regulatory solution must reach beyond emergency services.  Read More

Gilead Announces Access Program for Hepatitis C Drug

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Rachel Sachs

For all those who are interested in issues of global health, access to medicines, and drug pricing, yesterday Gilead formally announced its access program for enabling many developing countries to purchase its new Hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, at low prices. This announcement is particularly noteworthy because Sovaldi represents a significant improvement over the current standard of care for Hepatitis C, as it can cure a much greater percentage of sufferers than could standard therapies, and it does so with many fewer negative side effects. Gilead’s partnership-based program will permit seven Indian generic drug companies to produce and sell the drug in 91 developing countries. The discounts are significant: although Gilead formally charges $1,000 a pill (or $84,000 for a course of treatment) for Sovaldi in the United States, it will charge just 1% of that, or $10 a pill, in India (the total cost there is estimated at $1,800, given the difference in strain prevalence).

The global health community has reacted to the announcement with mixed reviews. The 91 countries in the program include more than half of the world’s Hepatitis C patients. But tens of millions of other patients in large nations like China, Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand are left out of the program. Going forward, some of the excluded nations may seek to issue compulsory licenses in an effort to expand access to Sovaldi.

Gilead has also drawn fire in the United States for Sovaldi’s $84,000 sticker price (which, for various reasons, very few if any will actually pay), to the degree that members of both houses of Congress have asked Gilead to justify the price of the drug. Those opposing Sovaldi’s price have generally not come out publicly against the high price of many orphan drugs, which can cost $250,000-$350,000 per year. But because Hepatitis C afflicts about 2.7 million people in the US, as compared to the few thousand people with one of the relevant orphan diseases, its impact on insurers (both public and private) is likely to be much larger (as this very blog has previously noted).  Read More

Pharmaceutical Pricing– The Story That Just Keeps Going

rbohrer Leave a comment

By Bob Bohrer

Cross-post from Pharmaceutical Policy

After last week’s foray into patents and pharmaceutical policy, which is perhaps the most technical and specialized area of pharmaceutical policy, I will return to the never-ending story of pharmaceutical prices and the controversy over Sovaldi, Gilead’s break-through Hepatitis C drug. Sovaldi has a “sticker price” of $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment, at the end of which 90% or more of patients would be expected to be cured. Since Sovaldi is a pill that is given once a day, the 12-weeks of treatment means that there are 84 daily doses. The math is easy, even if the price, unlike the pill, is hard to swallow–$1,000 per pill. The drug has been a huge financial success for Gilead, which reported $2.274 billion in sales in just the first quarter of 2014.   However, the backlash has been equally huge. In a rare display of bipartisanship in Washington, Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore), the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee and Senator Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa), the Ranking Member of the Finance Committee, sent a demand for information concerning the development costs of Sovaldi and Gilead’s pricing decision. However, even more than the investigation by two senior senators, the impetus for today’s post came from the blog RxObserver, which featured a post entitled Sovaldi: A Poster Child for Predatory Pricing [sic]. Before discussing the epithet “predatory pricing,” the perspective of RxObserver requires a bit of explanation. RxObserver is a site that primarily provides the views of pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs), or as the blog itself states its purpose: “the Clearinghouse of the Future for Pharmacy Benefits.” It is, in general, a very high-quality blog, with an editorial staff composed primarily of well-recognized academic and government experts in health care policy. I regularly read it and find it useful, although I was taken aback by that “predatory” epithet. Read More

Update and Thoughts on Lawsuit Over Medicare Hearing Backlog

mlawrence Leave a comment

Several months ago, I promised to post my thoughts on the viability of the American Hospital Association’s threatened lawsuit against the Secretary of Health and Human Services challenging the growing backlog of coverage appeals.  (See my post here).  That issue has become timely, because the AHA and several providers filed suit in May in the District of Columbia, and a few days ago filed a motion for summary judgment.   (See here).  There has been some coverage of the suit.  (See here and here.)  In short, their argument is that the statute says that a hearing must be held in 90 days and Medicare officials admit that the plaintiffs will not get a hearing for years, so therefore the court should order “mandamus,” forcing compliance with the 90 day deadline.

When I was in practice before moving to academia, I represented the Secretary in cases like this, so keep in mind my view might be biased.  But the government’s response to the complaint is due (by my calculation) Monday, July 28, so I wanted to offer my quick reactions about the case and what sort of response we might hear from the government.  I’ve just read over the AHA’s motion for summary judgment and I think that in a case like this, with an admitted violation of a statutory requirement, you have to start with the presumption that things could go bad for the government.  But with that said, I don’t think that the government’s case is as gloomy as it might at first appear, so this could be an interesting case to watch going forward.

Read More

Medicare Coverage for Sex Change Therapy: What’s Next

mlawrence Leave a comment

By Matthew Lawrence and Elizabeth Guo

Last month Medicare’s policy on coverage for sex change therapy changed somewhat. (See Matt’s earlier post here.) Specifically, Medicare’s Departmental Appeals Board invalidated the long-standing National Coverage Determination that dubbed sex change therapy to be non-covered, per se.

Co-blogger Elizabeth Guo and I have done some further digging on this issue and put together two posts answering some questions left open by Medicare’s decision and the news coverage surrounding it.  In this post we discuss next steps: what the change in coverage policy means for Medicare beneficiaries who want coverage for sex change therapy, and what, if any, additional developments are likely to follow.  In a companion post, we will be discussing the somewhat unusual process that was used to make this policy change.

Read More