Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday that negotiators still haven’t reached agreement on language to expand Medicare benefits and lower the price of prescription drugs, two major pieces of their agenda, but insisted “a final deal is within reach.”
Schumer signaled to reporters that Democrats are much closer to agreement on climate provisions, which he promised would make a “robust” contribution to addressing global warming.
But he acknowledged that two of Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) top priorities, expanding Medicare and cutting the cost of prescription drugs, remain unresolved.
The other holdups are a disagreement over creating a Medicaid-type program to expand health care coverage in states that opted out of expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, the length of a national paid family leave program, and a proposal to empower the IRS to broadly review banking activity to find unreported tax obligations.
“I believe that we will get this done and we will get it done soon,” Schumer said after a caucus meeting. “No one ever said that passing transformational legislation like this would be easy but are on track to get it done.
“There is universal consensus in our caucus that we have to come to agreement despite the differences in views on many issues,” he added. “I believe a final deal is within reach.”
Schumer said negotiators are making good progress on the climate provisions, despite a recent decision to drop the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which was a top priority of progressives who want to tackle carbon emissions.
“There’s going to be a very strong, robust climate package. And our goal is to meet the president’s goal and there are different ways to get there,” he said.
But he acknowledged the dispute between Sanders and Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) over expanding Medicare benefits and empowering the federal government to negotiate lower prescription drug prices remains unresolved.
“We’re working on both those issues now. As I said, we’re making progress. We’re not there yet on either of them but it’s important to do,” he said.
Schumer said earlier in the press conference that expanding Medicare benefits is one of his top priorities telling reporters: “I believe strengthening Medicare is very, very important.”
Large majorities of American voters across all political stripes favor letting Medicare negotiate drug prices, and most don’t buy into the argument that high drug prices are needed for drug companies to invest in new research, according to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
About 83% of all voters favor letting the federal government negotiate drug prices. Broken down by political ideology, that translates to 95% of Democrats, 82% of independents and 71% of Republicans.
About eight in 10 adults (83%) and adults 65 and older (78%) say they think the cost of prescription drugs is “unreasonable.”
WHAT’S THE IMPACT?
The Democrats’ budget reconciliation package includes a proposal to allow the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries and people enrolled in private plans. The proposal, which has been part of previous legislative proposals and estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to result in about $450 billion in savings to Medicare, has met strong opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, as well as some lawmakers.
Yet the proposal is largely popular among the public across parties, as well as among seniors, the group most directly impacted by such legislation.
The poll finds that when the public is presented with the main arguments being made by advocates on both sides of the debate, the shift in opinion is modest and support for negotiation remains high.
The argument against negotiation is that the government would be too involved, and would lead to fewer new drugs being available in the future. The argument for negotiation is that Americans pay higher prices than people in other countries, many can’t afford their prescriptions and drug company profits are too high.
After hearing the arguments for and against the proposal to allow the federal government to negotiate prices with drug companies, attitudes remained relatively unchanged with a majority continuing to favor the proposal.
Neither President Joe Biden nor members of either party in Congress have gained the full confidence of the public to do what’s right for the country on prescription drug pricing. Slightly less than half of the public say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in President Biden (46%) or Democrats in Congress (48%) to recommend the right thing for the country on prescription drug prices.
One-third of the public (33%) say they have at least a fair amount of confidence in Republicans in Congress, and few are confident that pharmaceutical companies will recommend the right thing (14%).
THE LARGER TREND
In August, President Biden called on Congress to pass solutions to lower prescription drug prices and hold brand-name drug manufacturers accountable, and said Medicare should have the ability to negotiate lower drug prices.
The president called for Medicare to cap yearly out-of-pocket drug costs for beneficiaries, as well as backing Food and Drug Administration efforts to accelerate the development of generic medicines, which typically have far lower costs to consumers. The negotiation push was part of a $3.5 trillion budget proposal that narrowly passed the House in August.
PhRMA CEO and president Stephen Ubl said by statement after Biden’s August speech: “Unfortunately, the policies the president outlined today would undermine access to life-saving medicines and fail to address an insurance system that shifts the cost of treatments onto vulnerable patients. Many in Congress know that access to medicine is critical for millions of patients and Medicare is not a piggy bank to be raided to fund other, unrelated government programs. This is a misguided approach.”
Ubl was referring to HR 3, the Elijah Cummings lower Drug Costs Now Act, which would use the money saved in Part D negotiations to help offset the $3.5 trillion spending bill. HR 3 passed the House in 2019 but was never voted on by the Senate.
It wasn’t the first time Biden has proposed having Medicare negotiate drug prices. In May, Biden called on Congress to lower prescription drug prices as part of his administration’s Fiscal Year 2022 Budget. During a joint address to Congress in April, the president called for lawmakers to work toward bipartisan solutions to lower prescription drug prices, including giving Medicare the ability to negotiate.
Conservative and industry groups are trying to whip up opposition to President Biden’s massive social spending plan by warning it will imperil Medicare benefits, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: “Medicscare” is a well-worn political tactic precisely because it can be effective. For Democrats, there’s zero room for defections against the $3.5 trillion proposal if they want to pass the bill.
What’s happening: Senior citizens in Arizona, represented by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), potential Democratic holdout, have started receiving large boxes labeled “Medical Shipment. Please open immediately.”
Inside, they find an empty prescription drug bottle and literature warning of Democratic plans to “ration Medicare Part D.” That’s a reference to a budget reconciliation bill provision that would allow the government to negotiate Medicare reimbursement rates for prescription drugs.
The mailers are the work of the Common Sense Leadership Fund, a Republican-aligned advocacy group. The mailers in Arizona specifically target Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), who’s up for re-election next year.
CSLF spokesman Colin Reed told Axios the group is mailing the packages to seniors and unaffiliated voters in Arizona and New Hampshire, where the group is targeting Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who’s also up for re-election.
Another nonprofit advocacy group, A Healthy Future, is targeting the prescription drug portions of the bill in a digital ad campaign aimed at key Democratic votes.
The group has spent nearly $300,000 on Google, Facebook and Instagram ads aimed at Reps. Frank Pallone, Tom Malinowski and Andy Kim, all Democrats from New Jersey — where the drug industry has a huge economic footprint.
“This is a prescription for disaster,” its ads say. They urge calls to Congress to “oppose cutting Medicare to pay for the $3.5 trillion spending plan.”
It’s not clear who’s behind A Healthy Future — the group did not respond to inquiries from Axios — but its messaging on reconciliation and past policy fights track with drug industry priorities.
The big picture: Democrats have turned to drug pricing reforms to offset part of the legislation’s massive price tag, potentially paying for as much as $600 billion in new spending.
Yes, but: The Mediscare tactic is larger than just the drug pricing fight. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed conservative advocacy group, is running its own ads warning of much larger impending Medicare cuts.
About 73% of health insurance markets are highly concentrated, and in 46% of markets, one insurer had a share of 50% or more, a new report from the American Medical Association shows. The report comes a few months after President Joe Biden directed federal agencies to ramp up oversight of healthcare consolidation.
The majority of health insurance markets in the U.S. are highly concentrated, curbing competition, according to a report released by the American Medical Association.
For the report, researchers reviewed market share and market concentration data for the 50 states and District of Columbia, and each of the 384 metropolitan statistical areas in the country.
They found that 73% of the metropolitan statistical area-level payer markets were highly concentrated in 2020. In 91% of markets, at least one insurer had a market share of 30%, and in 46% of markets, one insurer had a share of 50% or more.
Further, the share of markets that are highly concentrated rose from 71% in 2014 to 73% last year. Of those markets that were not highly concentrated in 2014, 26% experienced an increase large enough to enter the category by 2020.
In terms of national-level market shares of the 10 largest U.S. health insurers, UnitedHealth Group comes out on top with the largest market share in both 2014 and 2020, reporting 16% and 15% market share, respectively. Anthem comes in second with shares of 13% in 2014 and 12% in 2020.
But the picture looks different when it comes to the market share of health insurers participating in the Affordable Care Act individual exchanges. In 2014, Anthem held the largest market share among the top 10 insurers on the exchanges, with a share of 14%. By 2020, Centene had taken the top spot, with a share of 18%, while Anthem had slipped to fifth place, with a share of just 4%.
Another key entrant into the top 10 list in 2020 was insurance technology company Oscar Health, with 3% of the market share in the exchanges at the national level.
“These [concentrated] markets are ripe for the exercise of health insurer market power, which harms consumers and providers of care,” the report authors wrote. “Our findings should prompt federal and state antitrust authorities to vigorously examine the competitive effects of proposed mergers involving health insurers.”
The payer industry hit back. In a statement provided to MedCity News, America’s Health Insurance Plans, a national payer association, said that Americans have many affordable choices for their coverage, pointing to the fact that CMS announced average premiums for Medicare Advantage plans will drop to $19 per month in 2022 from $21.22 this year.
“Health insurance providers are an advocate for Americans, fighting for lower prices and more choices for them,” said Kristine Grow, senior vice president of communications at America’s Health Insurance Plans, in an email. “We negotiate lower prices with doctors, hospitals and drug companies, and consumers benefit from lower premiums as a result.”
Further, the report does not mention the provider consolidation that also contributes to higher healthcare prices. Mergers and acquisitions among hospitals and health systems have continued steadily over the past decade, remaining relatively impervious to even the Covid-19 pandemic.
Scrutiny around consolidation in the healthcare industry may grow. In July, President Joe Biden issued an executive order urging federal agencies to review and revise their merger guidelines through the lens of preventing patient harm.
The Federal Trade Commission has already said that healthcare businesses will be one of its priority targets for antitrust enforcement actions.
The pharmaceutical industry is on the verge of defeating a major Democratic proposal that would allow the federal government to negotiate drug prices.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) can afford only three defections when the House votes on a sweeping $3.5 trillion spending package, but Reps. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) and Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) last week voted to block the drug pricing bill from advancing out of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) voted against advancing the tax portion of the legislation in the House Ways and Means Committee.
All told, the number of House Democrats who have concerns about the drug pricing bill is in the double digits, and several Democrats in the 50-50 Senate would not vote for the measure in its current form, according to industry lobbyists.
The holdouts mark a sharp contrast to just two years ago, when every House Democrat voted for the same drug pricing bill, underscoring the inroads pharmaceutical manufacturers have made with the caucus on a measure that would narrow corporate profit margins.
“The House markups on health care demonstrate there are real concerns with Speaker Pelosi’s extreme drug pricing plan and those concerns are shared by thoughtful lawmakers on both sides of the aisle,” the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the industry’s top trade group, said in a statement following the committee votes.
The reversal follows the industry’s multimillion-dollar ad campaigns opposing the bill, timely political donations and an extensive lobbying effort stressing drugmakers’ success in swiftly developing lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines.
The bill at the center of the fight, H.R. 3, would allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs by tying them to the lower prices paid by other high-income countries. The measure is projected to free up around $700 billion through the money it saves on drug purchases — covering a big chunk of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending plan.
Drugmakers say the measure would reduce innovation, pointing to a Congressional Budget Office estimate that found it would lead to nearly 60 fewer new drugs over the next three decades.
Peters and other Democrats have proposed an alternative bill that would limit price negotiation to a fraction of the prescription drugs included in H.R. 3, focusing instead on drugs like insulin, the diabetes treatment that has seen its price rise dramatically over the last decade. The alternative measure also would set a yearly out-of-pocket spending limit for lower-income Medicare recipients.
The proposal foreshadows a less aggressive drug pricing compromise that uneasy Senate Democrats are more likely to get behind.
“You’re going to see something pass, but it probably won’t be H.R. 3,” said a lobbyist who represents pharmaceutical companies.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers oppose any efforts to control the price of prescription drugs, but the alternative bill is more favorable to the industry than the broader Democratic bill.
“Any kind of artificial price controls will have an impact on both new scientific investment as well as access to medicines,” said Rich Masters, chief public affairs and advocacy officer at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group that represents pharmaceutical giants such as Sanofi, Merck and Johnson & Johnson.
“We appreciate the focus on patient out of pocket costs, which we know is a critical component to any reform efforts and something that BIO and our member companies have long supported,” he added.
Progressive lawmakers, who have long bemoaned rising drug prices, blasted the three House Democrats who voted to block H.R. 3, saying they succumbed to industry donations and lobbying efforts.
“What the pharmaceutical industry has done, year after year, is pour huge amounts of money into lobbying and campaign contributions … the result is that they can raise their prices to any level they want,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a video message Friday.
The pharmaceutical industry spent $171 million on lobbying through the first half of the year, more than any other industry, to deploy nearly 1,500 lobbyists, according to money-in-politics watchdog OpenSecrets. That’s up from around $160 million at the same point last year, when the industry broke its own lobbying spending record.
Peters announced his opposition to Pelosi’s drug pricing proposal in May and shortly after was showered with donations from pharmaceutical industry executives and lobbyists, STAT News reported.
Peters is the No. 1 House recipient of pharmaceutical industry donations this year, bringing in $88,550 from pharmaceutical executives and PACs, according to OpenSecrets. Over his congressional career, Peters has received in excess of $860,000 from drugmakers, more than any other private industry.
The California Democrat told The Hill last week that accusations of his vote being guided by donations are “flat wrong” and noted that his San Diego congressional district employs roughly 27,000 pharmaceutical industry workers consisting mostly of researchers.
“It’s always going to be the attack because it’s simple and it’s easier than engaging on the merits,” he said.
Schrader received nearly $615,000 from the industry. He inherited a fortune from his grandfather, a former top executive at Pfizer, and had between $50,000 and $100,000 invested in Pfizer, in addition to other pharmaceutical holdings as of last year, according to his most recent annual financial disclosure.
Schrader tweeted last week that he is “committed to lowering prescription drug costs,” while arguing that the House bill would not pass the Senate in its current form.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) another supporter of Peters’s more industry friendly bill, received an influx of pharmaceutical donations in recent months, including a $2,000 check from Pfizer’s PAC in mid-August, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists have argued that now is not the time to go after drugmakers, which developed highly effective COVID-19 vaccines and are developing booster shots and other treatments to fight the virus.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents several major pharmaceutical manufacturers, said last month that Democratic drug pricing efforts will leave the U.S. “unprepared for the next public health crisis.”
PhRMA last week launched a seven-figure ad campaign to oppose H.R. 3. That’s after pharmaceutical groups and conservative organizations bankrolled by drugmakers spent $18 million on ads attacking the proposal through late August, according to an analysis from Patients for Affordable Drugs, a group that launched its own ads backing H.R. 3 last week.
The ad buys are meant to sway both lawmakers and the general public. A June Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 90 percent of Americans approve of the drug pricing measure, but that support dropped to 32 percent when they were told that the proposal “could lead to less research and development of new drugs.”
Contrary to what health care executives advertise, hospital mergers and acquisitions aren’t good for patients. They rarely improve access to health care or its quality, and they don’t reduce prices. But the system in place to stop them is often more bark than bite.
During 2019 and 2020, hospitals acquired an additional 3,200 medical practices and 18,600 physicians. By January 2021, almost half of all U.S. physicians were employed by a hospital or health system.
In 2018, the last year for which complete data are available, 72% of hospitals and more than 90% of hospital beds were affiliated with a health care system. Mergers and acquisitions are increasing the number of health care systems while decreasing the number of independently operated hospitals.
When hospitals buy provider practices, it leads to more unnecessary care and more expensive care, which increases overall spending. The same thing happens when hospitals merge or acquire other hospitals. These deals often increase prices and they don’t improve care quality; patients simply pay more for the same or worse care.
Mergers and acquisitions can negatively affect clinician morale as well. Some argue they lead to providers’ loss of autonomy and increase the emphasis on financial targets rather than patient care. They can also contribute to burnout and feeling unsupported.
Considerable machinery is in place at both the federal and state levels to stop “anticompetitive” mergers before they happen. But that machinery is limited by a lack of follow through.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice have always had broad authority over mergers. By law, one or both of these entities must review for any antitrust concerns proposed deals of a certain size before the deals are finalized. After a preliminary review, if no competition issues are identified, the merger or acquisition is allowed to proceed. This is what happens in most cases. If concerns are raised, however, the involved parties must submit additional information and undergo a second evaluation.
Some health care organizations seem willing to challenge this process. Leaders involved in a pending merger between Lifespan and Care New England in Rhode Island — which would leave 80% of the state’s inpatient market under one company’s umbrella — are preparing to move forward even if the FTC deems the deal anticompetitive. The companies will simply ask the state to approve the merger despite the FTC’s concerns.
The reality is that the FTC’s reach is limited when it comes to nonprofits, which most hospitals are. While the FTC can oppose anticompetitive mergers involving nonprofits, it cannot enforce action against them for anticompetitive behavior. So if a merger goes through, the FTC has limited authority to ensure the new entity plays fairly.
What’s more, the FTC has acknowledged it can’t keep up with its workload this year. It modified its antitrust review process to accommodate an increasing number of requests and its stagnant capacity. In July, the Biden administration issued an executive order about economic competition that explicitly acknowledges the negative impact of health care consolidation on U.S. communities. This is encouraging, signaling that the government is taking mergers seriously. Yet it’s unclear if the executive order will give the FTC more capacity, which is essential if it is to actually enforce antitrust laws.
At the state level, most of the antitrust power lies with the attorney general, who ultimately approves or challenges all mergers. Despite this authority, questionable mergers still go through.
In 2018, for example, two competing hospital systems in rural Tennessee merged to become Ballad Health and the only source of care for about 1.2 million residents. The deal was opposed by the FTC, which deemed it to be a monopoly. Despite the concerns, the state attorney general and Department of Health overrode the FTC’s ruling and approved the merger. (This is the same mechanism the Rhode Island hospitals hope to employ should the FTC oppose their merger.) As expected, Ballad Health then consolidated the services offered at its facilities and increased the fees on patient bills.
It’s clear that mechanisms exist to curb potentially harmful mergers and promote industry competition. It’s also clear they aren’t being used to the fullest extent. Unless these checks and balances lead to mergers being denied, their power over the market is limited.
Experts have been raising the alarm on health care consolidation for years. Mergers rarely lead to better care quality, access, or prices. Proposed mergers must be assessed and approved based on evidence, not industry pressure. If nothing changes, the consequences will be felt for years to come.
Medical debt can be a crushing burden for families, and it is a major problem in the United States. The nonprofit RIP Medical Debt says it’s wiped out debt for 2.7 million patients since 2014, totalling more than $4.5 billion. One of the most famous health policy studies ever conducted — the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment — found that having Medicaid coverage reduced a person’s likelihood of having an unpaid medical bill sent to collection by 25%. Now a study published last month in JAMA offers new evidence on the relationship between Medicaid and medical debt, and the scale of the country’s medical debt problem.
Using a subset of credit reports from one major U.S. credit agency for every year between 2009 and 2020, researchers Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin looked at the total amount of medical debt and new medical debt each year. They found that while both measures of medical debt have decreased almost every year since 2014, nearly 1 in 5 Americans were under collections for medical debt as of early 2020. They also found that since 2014, medical debt has been the largest source of debt for Americans, surpassing all other types of debt — credit cards, personal loans, utilities and phone bills — combined. And the medical debt was not evenly distributed around the country. Approximately, 1 in 4 individuals in the South were under collection for medical debt in 2020, but only 1 in 10 in the Northeast.
To assess the impact of Medicaid coverage on medical debt, Kluender and colleagues compared the total amount of new debt accrued by people living in states that expanded Medicaid and those that have not between 2009 and 2020, allowing them to confirm that any trends they identified didn’t pre-date Medicaid expansion in 2014. They found that between 2013 and 2020 the average amount of new medical debt decreased 34 percentage points more in states that expanded in 2014 compared to non-expansion states, and the drops were most prominent in the lowest income zip codes. The analysis can’t prove a causal relationship between medical debt and Medicaid expansion, but interestingly, the authors found no statistically significant difference in nonmedical debt between expansion and non-expansion states. This lack of an effect on nonmedical debt supports the association between Medicaid and reductions in medical debt.
The article does have limitations: It doesn’t include debts paid on a credit card or through payment plans; it doesn’t reflect the impact of COVID-19; and it can’t account for unobservable changes in policy or circumstance that might have coincided with Medicaid expansion and impacted medical debt. But it does add evidence to support the value of Medicaid coverage — a particularly timely finding, with more than 11 million people joining Medicaid since the start of the pandemic and Democrats in Congress looking to cover the more than 2 million people in the so-called coverage gap in the 12 non-expansion states.
Collection agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical debt in 2020, according to a study published July 20 in JAMA.
Researchers examined a nationally representative panel of consumer credit reports between January 2009 and June 2020. Below are four other notable findings from their report.
An estimated 17.8 percent of Americans owed medical debt in June 2020. The average amount owed was $429.
Over the time period studied, the amount of medical debt became progressively more concentrated in states that don’t participate in the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion program.
Between 2013 and 2020, states that expanded Medicaid in 2014 experienced a decline in the average flow of medical debt that was 34 percentage points greater than the average medical debt flow in states that didn’t expand Medicaid.
In the states that expanded Medicaid, the gap in the average medical debt flow between the lowest and highest ZIP code income levels decreased by $145, while the gap increased by $218 in states that did not expand Medicaid.
HENRY KOTULA 