The Wizard Behind The Curtain – Part 2

February 13th, 2019 by Tom Lynch

Let me tell you a story.

The year is 2015, and a workers’ compensation consultant is sitting in a highly respected insurer’s plush conference room. The consultant is meeting with the insurer’s Senior Vice President of Claims to negotiate price for an innovative specialty medicine program. What kind of program? Doesn’t matter.

The consultant has come armed with pro formas showing all costs of the program. Down to the penny. The problem is the insurer and the program are miles apart on what the insurer will pay the program’s doctors for each patient encounter. The Senior Vice President says, “Look, this isn’t exactly in our fee schedule, but the closest we can come to what is in the fee schedule is to pay your folks $85 per visit.” Hearing this, the consultant once again begins to explain why the fee needs to be $150 per visit.

This goes on for another half hour. The Senior VP finally says, “Well, maybe we could go to $91 per visit, but it’s the best we can do. Take it or leave it.” The consultant offers $140, but won’t go lower, because to do so would torpedo the program, which has demonstrated far more success, accompanied by significant cost savings, than others of its kind.

And then, it happens. The Senior Vice President in that plush conference room of this highly respected insurer says, “Hang on a minute. I’ve got it. You’re a specialty program, so we have a little latitude there. Charge us $300. We’ll pay you $150, and save our insureds $150 in the process.”

And that was how it was done. And it’s perfectly legal.

I tell that story by way of analogy.

Now let’s dream a bit. Imagine for a moment you are a pharmaceutical company CEO. You produce drugs that help sick people be healthy. Trouble is, the great big US healthcare system in which you operate makes Rube Goldberg seem like Thomas Edison. And in the center of your part of it sit pharmacy benefit managers, PBMs.

As we saw in Part One, the PBM industry has evolved in a rather chaotic way since Pharmaceutical Card System, Inc., invented the plastic benefit card in 1968. Over the intervening years, pharmacies and PBMs have developed into sometimes incestuous relationships. Today, three PBMs, Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum RX, control 78% of the market. They wield tremendous power in drug pricing in a system designed to be opaque.

Essentially, the PBM’s job is to negotiate with pharmacies and drug companies, like yours, on behalf of their insurer and health plan clients. They create formularies, negotiate prices down (you give them a big discount in return for your drug being listed in their formulary), return some of the savings, called rebates,  to the clients (nobody really knows how much), and keep some for themselves. Seems simple, right? Well, it’s not. It’s infinitely more complicated and complex. And because only a very few actually understand PBMs, they remind me of the shenanigans in The Wizard Of Oz. However, it is that way only because we have allowed it to happen over the last four decades.

But back to you, Here’s your issue as a drug company CEO: You know, regardless of what price you set for your super-duper drug, you’re going to have to give a lot of it back as a discount to the PBM so it can give rebates to its clients. What’s a busy CEO to do?

Well, one answer is to set the price, the list price, so high that you’ll be able to provide a generous discount and still make what your finance folks say you must have for a profit. Just like in my analogy from above.

In a weird sort of way, this works most of the time for patients, but only if they have health insurance. What happens if they don’t? This is where things get sticky. Uninsured people get stuck paying the full list price, the one you inflated in order to provide the discount that allows you to make a profit and PBMs to (kind of) save money for their customers. This has been especially difficult for some uninsured Type 1 diabetics, who, as we have written previously (here and here), have had great difficulty paying for the insulin they need to take every day ─  just to stay alive.

Many employers have had enough of this. According to the National Business Group on Health, 75% of surveyed employers believe the rebate system does not serve to lower prices for employees, and 91% believe an alternative, more simple approach is required. Then there is CMS’s Alex Azar, of Ely Lilly fame, who wants you to price your drugs like Europeans do, which is a water fall lower than prices in the US. And let us not forget the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who, as yet unable to fulfill a campaign promise about a wall, has an outside chance of fulfilling one about drug prices.

Neither the healthcare industry, nor the US Chamber of Commerce like any of this. I imagine it might also be a bit awkward for quite a few US legislators who have been significant beneficiaries of the healthcare industry’s largesse, largess of the campaign contribution variety.

Regardless, I’m an optimist, and I keep hoping that in some way the wizard behind the healthcare curtain will go ‘poof,’ and be gone. Silly me.

 

 

Tags: ,