Category Archives: Biosimilars

There Is No Single, Best Policy for Drug Prices

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, Barriors to Entry, Biosimilars, Competition, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Generic Drugs, Generic Entry, High Drug Prices, Market Exclusivity, Pharmaceutical Industry • Leave a comment

There Is No Single, Best Policy for Drug Prices

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A majority of Americans prefer greater regulation of prescription drug prices, meaning government intervention to lower them.

But don’t count on a single policy to address a nuanced problem.

“All low-priced drugs are alike; all high-priced drugs are high priced in their own way,” Craig Garthwaite, a health economist from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, wrote with a colleague.

Outside of a few government programs — like Medicaid and the Veterans Health Administration — low-priced drugs are alike in that competition is the sole source of downward pressure on prices. When many generic versions of a brand-name drug enter the market, competition can push their prices 80 percent below the brand price, or sometimes even more.

In contrast, high-priced drugs lack competition for various reasons, “not all of which imply our goal should be to reduce prices,” Mr. Garthwaite said.

 

 

 

Medical costs projected to increase 6% by 2020, says PwC

Posted on by • Posted in Biosimilars, Chronic Diseases, Generic Drugs, Health Policy, Health System, High Prices, Hospital, Hospital Industry, Out of Pocket Expenses, Telemedicine, Value-Based Healthcare • Leave a comment

https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/medical-costs-projected-increase-6-percent-2020-says-pwc?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWldZeVlXTm1aVEF6TVdKbSIsInQiOiJjbWFzeVA2TGlWZkNkXC9odGxcLzdLczFZSDYxd1hoYW04b0wxY0ljQ25zblpYN1VWc2FMWFFCQWpmc2tCYmE4d1Z3eVdMd2htY3JiSjZ3N2Urek43SHFJbWFsckdRbUNycFJoQjhzZm5VcGpJUUhKUDlBMWF2eGJzRUhmZGFlUUx0In0%3D

Utilization is still being dampened by high deductibles and other cost sharing, but at the expense of employee satisfaction.

Medical costs are rising, and by this time next year costs will likely show a modest increase of about 6% over the past two years, according to a new report from PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

After figuring in health plan changes such as increased employee cost sharing and network and benefit changes, PwC’s Health Research Institute, which conducted the study, projects a net growth rate of 5 percent. Even with employers’ actions, market forces likely will still overrun the efforts to quell them.

Prices, not utilization, are continuing to fuel healthcare spending. Utilization is still being dampened by high deductibles and other cost sharing, but at the expense of employee satisfaction with their health plan. In response, employers are inserting themselves more forcefully into the healthcare delivery equation.

WHAT’S THE IMPACT

Beyond market forces, HRI identified three “inflators” that will, influence the medical cost trend.

One is that drug spending will grow faster. Between 2020 and 2027, retail drug spending under private health insurance is projected to increase at a rate of 3 percent to 6 percent a year as the impact of generics on spending plateaus, biosimilars continue to see slow uptake, and costly new therapies enter the market.

Chronic diseases will also be a major issue. Obesity and Type 2 diabetes continue to produce high rates of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. Sixty percent of adults have a chronic disease, with 40 percent managing two or more. For employers, per capita health spending on someone with a complex chronic illness is eight times that of a healthy person.

Lastly, employers are beginning to recognize the importance of helping their employees manage their mental health and wellbeing. Nearly 75 percent of employers offer mental health disease management programs, the report found. Anytime access is expanded, costs will go up in the short term, though it may have the opposite effect long-term.

And speaking of the opposite effect, there are a few “deflators” HRI recognized that will likely slow down the medical cost trend.

HRI predicts that in 2020, more companies will take action to make sure healthcare is accessible to their employees, opening and expanding clinics as a strategy to control the cost trend. Thirty-eight percent of large employers offered a worksite clinic in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2014.

Also, payers are designing plans to encourage members to choose free-standing facilities and in-home care rather than more expensive sites. How those benefits are designed, and how employees perceive the costs, will shape the effectiveness of site of care strategies. Payers and employers are aiming to grow the role of telemedicine as employees grow more comfortable with it, especially if out-of-pocket costs are lower and the quality doesn’t suffer.

WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW

The trend has implications for employers, payers, providers and even pharmaceutical and life science companies.

For payers, it becomes important to  benchmark the prices paid commercially against a common reference point such as Medicare. With this information it’s possible to pursue value-based arrangements with high-performing and lower-cost providers, in addition to negotiating better contracted rates on existing fee-for-service arrangements.

For providers, a value line strategy is necessary as employers and consumers look for high quality care for a low cost. Providers armed with a value line strategy are more likely to be included in health plans’ high-performance networks, and are better positioned to directly contract with employers.

Providers should also understand what risk they can take on to guarantee a health outcome, and the cost structure needed to make them profitable in doing so. Providers should understand and manage both the risk inherent in their ability to deliver care and the risk of the population they’re managing — from health status to the social determinants impacting their health — to help them design appropriate clinical interventions and non-clinical support services.

For employers, it becomes imperative to understand their role as the purchaser of healthcare for employees and join the ranks of employer activists, pursuing new solutions to lower costs, improve access and enhance quality. Pharmaceutical and life science companies, meanwhile, should go beyond the basic outcomes-based arrangements currently in place and consider exploring and expanding alternative financing arrangements, such as subscription models for unlimited access to a product for a set period of time, or a mortgage model to finance expensive specialty drugs over time.

THE LARGER TREND

The PwC study loosely mirrors the findings of an October report from the Altarum Center for Value in Health Care, which found prices and spending in healthcare growing steadily, but at a moderate pace.

The country’s healthcare spending habits are at a level nearly double that of similar countries. Spending per capita in the U.S. is more than $9,000, compared to just over $5,000 in other Western nations, and because prices are growing slowly but steadily, spending is doing the same.

 

 

The drug pricing debate is stuck in the past

Posted on by • Posted in 2020 Election Issues, ACA, Biologics, Biosimilars, Competition, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Gene Therapy, Generic Drugs, Generic Entry, Health Policy, High Drug Prices, High Prices, Highly Specialized Drugs, Limited Competition, Out of Pocket Expenses, Patent Protections, Precision Medicine, Preexisting Conditions • Leave a comment

https://www.axios.com/drug-pricing-debate-stuck-in-past-10ba315e-0ddf-4013-8c5a-f8ee89c2f530.html

Illustration of falling pills and coins

There’s a scientific and economic revolution happening in medicine, and the political debate over drug prices isn’t keeping up. Not only are policymakers struggling to agree on solutions, they’re mostly talking about yesterday’s problems.

Why it matters: Medical innovation is already hurtling toward a new era of highly specialized drugs — some are even tailor-made for each individual patient. They may be more effective than anything we’ve seen before, and also more expensive. But the drug-pricing debate is more focused on decades-old parts of the system.

The big picture: “We haven’t really contemplated how we’re going to absorb some of these things,” Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb said. “These are good problems to have…but they are policy challenges.”

Where it stands: Congress is mainly squabbling over proposals to reduce prices by boosting competition — by making it easier to start developing generics, or by changing patent protections that help pharmaceutical companies keep their rivals at bay.

Yes, but: Those regulatory tools were designed for a world in which pharmaceutical companies develop relatively simple drugs and try to market them to a big group of people. But science is rapidly moving away from that world.

  • Gene therapy, for example, is the new wave in cancer treatment. It helps patients’ own immune systems fight off cancer — which means each dose is custom-made for each patient. It’s a highly promising approach, but treatment can come with a price tag north of $1 million once all is said and done.
  • The old dichotomy of a brand-name pill followed by a generic version of that pill doesn’t really hold up for custom-made drugs.
  • So tools that try to promote competition simply may not work as well. “I don’t think they’re solutions for gene therapies because I think you’re ultimately going to have to figure out ways to capitalize those costs,” Gottlieb said.

Even without being custom-made, many new drugs are still trying to treat smaller groups of patients — like people with the same specific genetic mutation.

  • “Generic entry might not prove to be as successful for addressing this problem as it has historically been, and I think it’s because we fundamentally have shifted into these other types of products where competition is just more challenging,” Vanderbilt’s Stacie Dusetzina said.

Most of these new drugs belong to a class known as biologics. They’re more complex than the drugs we’re used to, and therefore have the potential to be more precise in the way they interact with your body.

  • “The way drugs are produced and made now is quite different from the way they were produced and made in the early ‘80s, and that’s both because…you have a lot of these drugs being made for small populations, and for biologics the science is so much more complicated,” said Rachel Sachs, a professor at Washington University.
  • Biologics don’t have traditional generic versions; the equivalent are products known as “biosimilars.”
  • The Affordable Care Act created a pathway for the FDA to approve biosimilars, but that market has been slow to take off, and at least in the early going, biosimilars often don’t offer the same steep discounts as traditional generics.

Promoting competition isn’t the only idea in the world, but more muscular price controls are much more controversial.

  • Most of these new, complex drugs are administered at a doctor’s office, not picked up from a pharmacy. The Trump administration has proposed tying Medicare’s payments for that class of drugs to the lower prices that other countries pay, and Democrats support direct Medicare price negotiations.

The bottom line: “One version of ten years from now will have very limited competition in certain types of markets, either because the market has eroded it to be that way or because the drugs that are coming out will by definition have limited competition,” said Rena Conti, a professor at Boston University.