Radar on Drug Benefits

With abortion banned or on the verge of a ban in a growing number of states following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, medication abortion has become more important than ever for women and pregnant people seeking abortion care. Abortifacients, the class of prescription drug used to terminate pregnancies, can be used more discreetly than surgical abortions: they don’t require an in-person consultation and, since the start of the pandemic, have been dispensed online without medical risk to patients.

However, experts say that the legal status of medication abortion is far from settled in states where abortion has been banned. Many patients haven’t heard that medication abortion is available, and women and pregnant people who do use abortifacients — or suffer a miscarriage — could face prosecution in states where abortion has been banned. It’s not clear what sort of criminal or civil risk providers, purchasers and carriers will bear if their patients and plan members use abortifacients prescribed across state lines.

Pharmacists and other non-physician care managers can improve the quality of diabetes care in the primary care setting, but structural issues make it difficult to fully leverage their potential, according to research published in the July issue of the journal Health Affairs.

“We need to have a different way of taking care of people with a chronic illness,” said Thomas Bodenheimer, a professor emeritus of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who spoke at a Health Affairs briefing on July 19. The briefing convened several researchers who published diabetes-focused articles in the journal’s July issue.

Among people who filled at least one insulin prescription, 14.1% reached catastrophic health spending — out-of-pocket medical spending greater than 40% of a household’s remaining income after subsistence needs are met — and almost two-thirds of them were Medicare beneficiaries, according to a recent Health Affairs study.

The study was based on data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey in 2017 and 2018. Among the respondents who filled at least one insulin prescription, 41.1% were covered by Medicare and 35.7% by private insurance. Median annual out-of-pocket spending on insulin was $97.72, while people with Medicare coverage and private insurance paid much more than Medicaid enrollees.

After more than a year of deliberation and false starts, Congress might finally reform pricing and federal purchasing of prescription drugs in the fall, D.C. insiders tell AIS Health, a division of MMIT. The substance of the drug pricing bill is similar to previous proposals, but the political ground inside the Democrats’ Senate caucus may have shifted enough to allow prescription drug pricing to eke through as part of a diminished catch-all spending bill that would still be the signature achievement of the beleaguered Biden administration.

Progress on the drug pricing bill resumed when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on July 7 submitted the text of a bill to the Senate parliamentarian. The parliamentarian will deem whether the bill conforms with the Senate rules that govern the budget reconciliation process. Budget reconciliation is an arcane procedure that allows the Senate to pass legislation with a simple majority, so long as the bill in question relates largely, in the parliamentarian’s judgment, to the budget.

The state of California announced last week that it would become the first state to manufacture its own insulin, while a payer-owned coalition said it would distribute its initial generic medication later this summer. Taken together, the moves show that some payers, be they the government or health insurers, are serious about reining in the costs of generics and dealing with inefficiencies in the pharmaceutical supply chain, according to health policy and drug pricing experts who spoke with AIS Health, a division of MMIT.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) revealed the insulin plans on July 7 via a video on Twitter, keeping to a promise he had first made in 2019 when he was elected to office. The announcement followed the news in June that EmsanaRx became the first PBM to join CivicaScript, a company founded two years ago by a consortium of payers that is aiming to manufacture and lower the cost of generic medications in outpatient settings. In addition, Navitus Health Solutions, a startup PBM that touts a 100% pass through model, joined the CivicaScript partnership on July 13.

In 2022, the majority of plan sponsors used a drug benefit consultant while designing their drug benefit programs, according to Pharmaceutical Strategies Group’s 2022 “Trends in Drug Benefit Design Report,” sponsored by Rx Savings Solutions. The report, which is based on surveys of 153 individuals representing employers, union/Taft-Hartley plans and health plans that covered an estimated 35.1 million lives, also revealed an increasing focus on member satisfaction.

Digital evidence from apps, wearables and remote sensors is already being used by medical product developers to test and measure their effectiveness. The FDA issued draft guidance earlier this year on the use of digital health technologies to acquire data remotely from clinical trial participants. And the European Medicines Agency approved its first digital endpoint, accepting one to be used to evaluate medications for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Payers are next, warned Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), speaking at the AHIP 2022 conference in Las Vegas, N.V.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on June 27 to hear a case that could have saddled PBMs with a fiduciary responsibility to a clients under ERISA. The case, a class action lawsuit titled John Doe v. Express Scripts, considered whether PBMs have a fiduciary duty to lower drug prices for clients, which is not the standard required by existing law or industry practice. However, some proposals currently under consideration by Congress would impose such a requirement, which could end practices such as spread pricing.

Pharmacy benefit consultants have mixed views on how many plan sponsors are turning to alternate funding programs, which aim to save on specialty drug costs by eliminating coverage for certain drugs and diverting costs to pharmaceutical companies’ patient assistance programs. But scrutiny of the programs is growing, with one major pharma company challenging the legality of these programs in court.

“A large percentage” of WTW’s employer clients now are using this strategy, Chantell Sell Reagan, Pharm.D., the national pharmacy practice clinical lead for WTW, tells AIS Health, a division of MMIT.

Newly released results of a Prime Therapeutics LLC oncology program suggest that if the PBM were to expand its highly coordinated oral oncology dispensing model beyond the pilot population, cost savings could exceed $1 million. And these promising results signal that the model may be on the brink of expanding into more disease states.

Prime’s medically integrated dispensing (MID) model, which takes a high-touch, care coordination-intensive approach, cut waste by limiting overfills, according to a Prime study released June 2. Compared with the traditional central specialty pharmacy dispensing of oral oncology drugs, the MID pilot involving 627 patients across three commercial insurance plans showed the potential to cut $1,800 in costs “per medication dose change,” according to the results.