The Senate Finance Committee keeps wading through that long list of amendments to the Baucus bill, and interesting nuggets keep popping up. The latest to catch our eye: An amendment adopted today that would force pharmacy benefit managers that participate in health-insurance exchanges to share key information with the government.
The amendment is conveniently located on page 129 of this PDF.
PBMs are little known but powerful players that manage companies’ prescription drug benefit plans. They’re none too happy about the prospect of disclosing how much of the savings they negotiate from drug makers are passed on to consumers, and similar sorts of details.
The amendment, sponsored by Washington Dem Maria Cantwell, specifies that the information would be kept confidential by the government. But Mark Merritt, president of the PBM trade group Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, said that information might leak out. That would hurt PBMs’ ability to negotiate low prices for drugs and lead to higher prices for patients, he argued.
“There’s no way this is going to benefit consumers, taxpayers or the federal government,” he told the Health Blog. Merritt’s group represents the biggies in the field, including Medco, Express Scripts and CVS Caremark.
Cantwell disagrees. “What we’re after here is transparency of drug pricing,” she said in a statement. “This kind of transparency will help drive down drug prices in a significant fashion.”
The CBO has estimated that the Cantwell amendment would be budget neutral, Merritt said. In 2007, CBO said requiring managers of Medicare Part D plans to disclose the rebates they receive would “very likely” cost Medicare less than $10 billion over 10 years.
As the WSJ noted last month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health-overhaul bill also included a provision that would require more disclosure from PBMs.
No comments:
Post a Comment