Category Archives: Uncategorized

Health care giants are dependent on payments Trump wants to end

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https://www.axios.com/drug-prices-medicare-cvs-humana-unitedhealth-trump-1d66d7d6-66ea-4150-89f5-e3b357b17bb2.html

An older man grabs his prescription drugs at a pharmacy counter.

The 3 big health insurers that control a majority of Medicare’s prescription drug coverage — CVS Health, Humana and UnitedHealth Group — are arguably the most at risk from the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate rebates within Medicare.

The big picture: These companies rely heavily on rebates to offset the costs of covering seniors’ prescriptions. Losing those rebates would shift billions of dollars away from them, and they could lose customers if they raise premiums to make up the difference.

By the numbers: Axios analyzed the Medicare businesses within the companies’ 2018 filings with state insurance commissioners.

  • UnitedHealthcare paid $7.3 billion in prescription drug claims and received $4.1 billion in rebates, according to its major subsidiary in Connecticut.
  • Humana paid $7.1 billion in prescription drug claims and received $3.9 billion in rebates, according to its major subsidiary in Wisconsin.
  • CVS paid $6.3 billion in prescription drug claims and received $3.5 billion in rebates, according to its SilverScript subsidiary.

Between the lines: Those rebates offset more than half of what these 3 companies had to pay for people’s prescriptions.

  • That’s well above the average for all Medicare drug plans, which was just 25% in 2018 (Table IV.B8).
  • Plans don’t keep Medicare rebates as profit, and instead pass them back to the federal government. (They do, however, keep a small percentage of rebates from their commercial plans.)
  • The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

The bottom line: CVS, Humana and UnitedHealth — all of which vehemently oppose Trump’s proposed rebate rule — are “overly dependent on rebates to keep premiums low [so they can] buy market share, which is what these guys have been doing for the past decade,” said Emily Evans, a health care managing director at investment research firm Hedgeye.

  • If those rebates go away, sooner or later the big 3 would have to raise monthly premiums to avoid losses.
  • And hiking drug plan premiums could persuade seniors to switch to competing plans that don’t rely on rebates and therefore won’t need to raise their premiums as much.

 

 

 

CVS to Judge: Please Don’t Let Those 7 Witnesses Testify

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https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/strategy/cvs-judge-please-dont-let-those-7-witnesses-testify

The pharmacy chain asked for a narrow hearing on its DOJ-approved purchase of Aetna, as seven witnesses prepare to testify against it.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Both CVS and the DOJ argue the hearing should be narrowly tailored, with at least some witnesses excluded.

If allowed to proceed as proposed, the hearing could devolve into “a forum for airing competitors’ grievances,” CVS warned.

CVS Health asked the federal judge overseeing its acquisition of Aetna to prevent seven witnesses who lined up to testify against the megamerger from speaking at a hearing next month.

Although antitrust regulators with the U.S. Department of Justice greenlit the CVS-Aetna deal last fall, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., made clear that his review should not be seen as a rubber stamp. Leon said he wanted to hear from witnesses before deciding whether to sign off on the DOJ-approved deal.

The seven witnesses put forward by three groups of amici curiae include health policy professors and economists from major universities, but CVS argued in a court filing Friday that Leon should decline altogether to hold a hearing with live witnesses. The planned testimony, as outlined in court filings, includes irrelevant arguments that could turn the hearing “into a forum for airing competitors’ grievances about the CVS-Aetna merger and about the healthcare industry more generally,” attorneys for CVS wrote.

The CVS filing argues that the three groups of amici—the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the American Medical Association (AMA), and Consumer Action with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG)—would be advancing their own competitive interests if the hearing were to proceed.

“Amici’s submissions demonstrate that such a hearing is unnecessary in light of the considerable record already before the Court,” attorneys for CVS wrote, “and Amici’s planned presentations, consisting almost exclusively of unreliable competitor testimony on issues that are not relevant to the Court’s Tunney Act determination, will add little, if anything, of value.”

In its own filing Monday, the DOJ argued that Leon should limit the testimony to only those items relevant to the scope of Tunney Act review. The DOJ asked the court to strike five of the seven witnesses entirely and limit of the scope of the testimony offered by the other two.

“These limitations will ensure that the hearing remains within the appropriate statutory and constitutional bounds, and will protect the Executive Branch’s constitutionally mandated control over its resource-allocation decisions in the enforcement of antitrust laws,” DOJ attorneys wrote.

 

 

 

Getting Distracted by the Politics of Healthcare

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A number of interactions over the past two weeks have convinced me that the political debate over M4A in Congress, amplified by Presidential candidates jockeying for favor with primary voters, is beginning to seriously spook executives across healthcare.

At a health system board meeting in the Southwest last week, a number of physician leaders and board members had questions about the possible timing and dimensions of a shift to “single payer”, clearly convinced that M4A is an inevitability if Democrats take over in 2020. And two separate inbound calls this week, one from the CEO of a regional health system, and the other from a health plan executive, were both sparked by the hearings on M4A in Congress.

Again, the implicit assumption in their questions about timing and impact was the same: M4A, or something like it, is sure to happen if the 2020 elections favors Democrats. My response to all of them: keep an eye on the politics, but don’t get overly distracted. There’s little chance that “single payer” healthcare will come to the US—industry lobbies are simply too powerful to let that happen.

Even if Democrats do win the Senate and the White House in 2020, they’ll have to “govern to the center” to hold onto their majorities, and any major policy shifts will have to be negotiated across the various interests involved. Most likely: measures to strengthen provisions of the ACA, and perhaps a “public option” in the ACA exchanges.

As to Medicare expansion, I believe the most we’d see in a Democratic administration would be a compromise allowing 55- to 65-year-olds to buy into Medicare Advantage plans.

But for now, M4A’s biggest risk to hospitals and doctors is that it becomes a paralyzing distraction, keeping provider organizations from making the strategic and operational changes needed to re-orient care delivery around value.

Regardless of the politics, a focus on delivering value to the consumers of care will prove to be a no-regrets position for providers.