More Clouds Form Over 340B Program

P&T - October 15, 2017 the original can be found HERE.

Potential Medicare Cut Underlines Need to Rein In Program

Drug manufacturers, and to a lesser extent hospitals, have complained for years about the shortcomings of the 340B Drug Pricing Program, which allows nearly 3,000 hospitals and approximately 10,000 health clinics around the country to buy pharmaceuticals at a deep discount as a means of generating revenue, ostensibly to help lower-income patients and their communities. Complaints from both parties have been validated by the Government Accountability Office (GAO)¹ and the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)^2,3 and discussed at congressional hearings, where the program’s opaque guidelines and barely visible program integrity efforts have been thoroughly aired.

Yet since Congress established the 340B program in 1992, very little has changed, except for the program opening to many more hospitals and clinics thanks to the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). At the latest hearings on the program’s weaknesses, held in July by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce (E&C) Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, U.S. Representative Fred Barton (R-Michigan), who has a number of 340B hospitals in his district, said, “I am just trying to educate the subcommittee how screwed up this program is.”⁴

Of course, Congress, having ignored the program’s multiple deficiencies for years, has had a major role in the program’s dysfunction. Congress’ record on legislating improvements for the 340B program is somewhere between negligible and non existent. At the E&C hearings, U.S. Representative Frank Pallone (D-New Jersey), the top Democrat on the committee, said, “Last Congress, this committee worked on a bipartisan basis to try to address the concerns from stakeholders on all sides of this issue in a balanced and measured fashion.”⁴ Nothing came of that effort. Pallone’s spokesman did not respond to an email asking what the barriers were in the last Congress, and whether they are surmountable in this Congress.

But it looks like Democrats and Republicans on the Hill are waking up, and that has a lot to do with the Trump administration. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to exact a severe reduction in Medicare reimbursement to hospitals for 340B drugs. That will probably force the House and Senate to confront the program’s problems and make some changes as the price for forcing the CMS to back off either somewhat or fully from its plans to hit some hospitals with revenue losses, a prospect that has hospital lobbyists crawling over Capitol Hill arguing the sky is falling.

How 340B Works

The 340B program allows participating hospitals and clinics to buy drugs at a discount, give them to eligible patients, and then bill the insurers (private companies, Medicare, or Medicaid) for the full price of the drug. That difference between the lower price hospitals pay for a drug and the higher price at which they are reimbursed constitutes an important revenue stream, especially for safety-net hospitals serving large uninsured populations. Medicare currently pays all hospitals, 340B or not, average sales price (ASP) plus 6% for drugs hospitals supply to eligible outpatients, such as oncology drugs provided in outpatient clinics and reimbursed under Medicare’s Part B program. The CMS wants to reduce its reimbursement to 340B hospitals to ASP minus 22.5%.⁵

That proposal has outraged the hospital industry, although only 45% of acute-care hospitals participate in 340B. “The CMS proposal to reduce reimbursement of 340B-purchased drugs has the potential to be very harmful to the sickest and most vulnerable patients by endangering their access to essential health care services,” said Kasey K. Thompson, PharmD, MS, MBA, Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of the American Society of Health–System Pharmacists, in a July press release. “These changes run counter to the statutory intent of the federal 340B program and will incur a steep cost to the people and the organizations that can least afford it.”⁶

The reduction in Part B reimbursement to 340B hospitals would amount to an increase in the funds the CMS would be able to spend on other hospital outpatient services. How that extra money would be distributed has not been decided, and the CMS has asked for suggestions.⁵ But in an attempt to assuage concerns about the impact on the most vulnerable hospitals with the highest percentage of vulnerable patients, the agency is considering targeting recouped funds “to hospitals that treat a large share of indigent patients, especially those patients who are uninsured.” Many 340B hospitals already have large populations of uninsured patients; but some academic centers have smaller percentages as measured by their disproportionate share (DSH) percentage, which is an approximate measure of Medicaid patients.

Despite opposition to the reductions, it appears that key House members believe the price of averting some or all of that reduction will be Congress finally addressing some of the many underlying weaknesses of the 340B program. U.S. Representative Diana DeGette (D-Colorado) said at the hearings, “We probably do need to get more controls and that is why I said in my opening statement that we may need to have more—we need to have more legislative reporting and more transparency because you can’t have a program where nobody knows what’s going on.”⁴

The lack of transparency probably leads to understatement of some of the program’s substantive failings. The CMS argues that the program encourages hospitals to supply more expensive drugs than are necessary to too many patients. Some of the hospitals in the program that are profitable and serve mostly well-off clienteles, such as academic hospitals, earn substantial revenue from the program while providing limited charity care, raising questions about whether they deserve the discounts. Moreover, reports from the GAO establish that, on average, beneficiaries at 340B DSH hospitals were either prescribed more drugs or more expensive drugs than beneficiaries at the other non-340B DSH hospitals. In fact, it is possible for 340B hospitals to supply any billionaire with discount drugs. At the same time, it is perfectly legal for a 340B hospital to charge an uninsured patient full price for a 340B drug. The program is run by the Office of Pharmacy Affairs (OPA) within HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The OPA, one of Washington’s backwater agencies, has struggled to administer and enforce jumbled rules with just 16 staffers and a severely anemic $10 million budget.

How a Medicare Reimbursement Reduction Would Affect Hospitals and Patients

Part of the rationale for the proposed Medicare reimbursement reduction, according to Thomas E. Price, MD, Secretary of the HHS, is to reduce the price of pharmaceuticals. Democrats have lampooned that stance, and even some Republicans are skeptical of it. Theoretically, Medicare beneficiaries could see lower prices since they are required to pay a 20% copay for outpatient drugs they receive under Part B. That copayment is based on the Medicare reimbursement rate, which is ASP plus 6%. If that dropped precipitously to ASP minus 22.5%, the “Medicare price” would fall, reducing copayments for Medicare recipients, who are currently paying whopping copayments in some instances.

In the Federal Register notice announcing the prospective change in Medicare outpatient reimbursement in calendar year 2018, the CMS explained, citing an OIG report from November 2015: “Based on an analysis of almost 500 drugs billed in the hospital outpatient setting in 2013, the OIG found that, for 35 drugs, the ‘difference between the Part B amount and the 340B ceiling price was so large that, in a least one quarter of 2013, the beneficiary’s coinsurance alone … was greater than the amount a covered entity spent to acquire the drug.’ ” ⁵

Of course, to the extent a 340B hospital provides discounted drugs to Medicaid patients and then bills Medicaid, that will not affect the consumer prices those patients pay because the reduction to ASP minus 22.5% will not apply to Medicaid reimbursement. Medicaid patients do not pay much, if at all, for their prescription drugs. In an email response, Margaret Kemeny, MD, Director of NYC Health & Hospitals/Queens Cancer Center, a 340B participant, says the majority of her patients do not have insurance. “If they have cancer, we can put them on emergency Medicaid. Very few patients have Medicare,” she writes. “The hospital gets their drugs through 340B. All patients are not charged for the drugs.”

The fact that a high percentage of 340B patients are either uninsured or on Medicaid raises the question of how badly a reduction in Medicare payment would hurt hospitals generally, and 340B hospitals specifically. According to 340B Health, which lobbies for 340B “covered entities,” total sales to 340B covered entities in 2015 were $4.2 billion, or 0.9% of total U.S. drug spending. So the program itself has a minimal impact on drug pricing nationally. Tom Mirga, Editorial Director for 340B Health, says there are no statistics that shed light on the percentage of that $4.2 billion that went to Medicare patients, so it is hard to estimate the impact a reduction of ASP minus 22.5% would have on 340B providers.

One pharmacy manager for a chain of hospitals, who did not want to be identified, said the cut would affect the local 340B hospitals and nationally within his system in a big way, depending upon each site and their percentage of Part B Medicare patients. That varies from hospital to hospital. He guesses it averages perhaps 30%. Another worry is whether commercial insurances will try to negotiate these types of payment rates in the future.

Drug manufacturers have been the loudest complainants about the program. Discounts to 340B hospitals and clinics are mandatory if manufacturers want to sell drugs to state Medicaid programs. They are required to set discounts at whatever level they chose as long as it is below the ceiling price established by HRSA. Would the 600 or so drug manufacturers who participate in the program lower their prices to 340B hospitals if the CMS reduces reimbursement? Nicole Longo, Senior Manager of Public Affairs for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), declines to answer the question about how reform of the program would affect the prices drug manufacturers charge 340B hospitals. “PhRMA cannot speak to how individual companies might react and whether any companies would adjust drug prices,” she says. For companies to increase their prices to 340B participants, Congress would either have to change the calculation HRSA is required to make to establish ceiling prices for each drug or drug companies now selling below the ceiling price could theoretically raise their price.

“The 340B program is in need of fundamental change that is beyond the scope of the Medicare proposed payment reduction,” Longo says, “and the congressional hearing held in July was an important first step toward modifying the 340B program to ensure it returns to serving the vulnerable or uninsured patients it was intended to help.”

If Congress finally makes an effort to reform the program, it will find a willing partner in the Trump administration beyond Medicare officials determined to slash reimbursement. Krista Pedley, PharmD, MS, CDR, USPHS, Director of the OPA, says, “In the fiscal year [FY] 2018 president’s budget, we did propose to intend to work with Congress on a legislative proposal to ensure the benefit of the program does benefit the low-income uninsured populations.”

340B Expansion Since PPACA

Reducing Medicare reimbursement would save the agency about $900 million a year based on the agency’s preliminary estimates, which could change going forward. Medicare’s proposal in July to severely reduce what it reimburses hospitals is the result of its soaring 340B costs, which are in part the result of Congress’s decision in the PPACA to greatly increase the number of health facilities, including types of hospitals, eligible to participate in the 340B program.

To be eligible for the 340B program, a hospital must be: 1) owned by a state or local government, 2) a public or nonprofit hospital that is formally delegated governmental powers by a state or local government, or 3) a nonprofit hospital under contract with a state or local government to provide services to low-income patients who are not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. A 2015 report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) said regarding the third option for eligibility, for example, that HRSA has not specified criteria for contracts between nonprofit hospitals and state or local governments, such as the amount of care that a hospital must provide to low-income patients under such a contract.⁷ Thus, hospitals with contracts to provide a relatively small amount of care to low-income individuals could be eligible for 340B discounts, which may not have been what HRSA intended.

Several types of hospitals as well as clinics that receive certain federal grants from HHS (e.g., federally qualified health centers and Ryan White grantees) may enroll in the program as covered entities. In addition to DSH hospitals, which were always the key participant in the program since its creation, the PPACA greatly expanded the covered entities eligible to purchase 340B drugs to critical-access hospitals, rural referral centers, sole community hospitals, children’s hospitals, and freestanding cancer hospitals. The number of unique participating covered entities has grown from 3,200 in 2011 to 11,180 in February 2015 to 12,148 in October 2016. The number of hospitals in particular has grown significantly from 591 in 2005 to 1,673 in 2011 to 2,871 as of July 2017.
In addition, the number of contract pharmacies has grown greatly since HRSA issued its 2010 guidance on contract pharmacies.

Contract pharmacies are retail pharmacies in the community that allow a 340B hospital to expand the number of its patients, if properly qualified, who have access to discount drugs. The more patients getting 340B drugs, the more revenue the hospital gets. Prior to 2010, hospitals could only supply 340B drugs from one outpatient pharmacy, typically located in the hospital. In 2011, the GAO reported that while HRSA did not track individual contract pharmacies in use, there were more than 7,000 contract pharmacy arrangements through the program. In its 2018 Budget Justification, HRSA reported that 27% of covered-entity sites have contract pharmacy arrangements, resulting in approximately 18,078 unique pharmacy locations. The OIG found that contract pharmacy arrangements created difficulties for covered entities in preventing the diversion of drugs and duplicate discounts.

Once a hospital has determined it is eligible and has been accepted by HRSA for participation, it supplies discounted drugs to “eligible patients,” a term that has been murky from the start. The definition of “patient” was established in 1996 and includes three criteria:

• The covered entity must have a relationship with the individual, which HRSA defines as maintaining the individual’s health care records;
• The individual receives health care services from a health care professional who is employed by the entity or who provides care under contractual or other arrangements (e.g., referral for consultation), such that responsibility for the individual’s care remains with the entity; and
• The individual receives a service or range of services from the covered entity that is consistent with the service or services for which grant funding or federally qualified health center look–alike status has been provided (this criterion does not apply to hospitals).

HRSA audits from FY 2012 to FY 2016 demonstrate that noncomplying entities violate program requirements in at least one of three ways: duplicate discounts, diversion to ineligible patients and facilities, and incorrect database reporting. In FYs 2012, 2015, and 2016, close to half of HRSA’s audited entities diverted benefits to ineligible patients: 31% of covered entities in FY 2012, 47% of covered entities in FY 2015, and 44% of covered entities in FY 2016 were found to have diverted drugs. Diversion violations reached a 54% high in FY 2014 and FY 2015, when more than 50 audited entities offered drug-pricing benefits to ineligible patients.⁸

HRSA has issued guidance on the definition of “patient.” According to part of the guidance, the individual must receive health care services from a health care professional who is employed by the entity or who provides care under contractual or other arrangements, such that responsibility for the individual’s care remains with the entity.⁹ But the MedPac report of 2015 stated HRSA has not clarified the meaning of “other arrangements” or “responsibility for the individual’s care.”⁷ The lack of specificity in the guidelines for who is an eligible patient makes it possible for covered entities to interpret this term either too broadly or too narrowly, according to the GAO. For example, HRSA has expressed concern that some covered entities may consider individuals to be eligible patients even when the entity does not have actual responsibility for their care.

Drug Pricing

Drug manufacturers have been vocal critics of the elasticity of the 340B program definitions, such as who are eligible patients and whether hospitals are providing adequate charity care. The hospitals, in turn, have criticized drug pricing within the program. HRSA establishes the ceiling price as the difference between the drug’s average manufacturer price and its unit rebate amount (URA). HRSA calculates URAs using a statutory formula that is based on the formula used to calculate Medicaid drug rebates. The statutory formula for the URA varies based on whether the drug is a single-source or innovator drug, a multiple-source drug (e.g., a brand-name drug), a noninnovator multiple-source drug (e.g., a generic drug), or a clotting factor or exclusively pediatric drug. According to statute, HRSA is allowed to disclose ceiling prices to covered entities but not to the general public.

Hospitals buy their drugs either directly from the manufacturer or from a company called Apexus, which manages the 340B Prime Vendor Program (PVP). By pooling the purchasing power of covered entities, Apexus negotiates subceiling prices on many 340B drugs with manufacturers, which allows covered entities to pay less than the ceiling price. By the end of FY 2013, Apexus had more than 7,000 drugs under contract, with an estimated average savings of 10% below the ceiling price. Apexus also negotiates discounts on other pharmacy products and services not eligible for 340B pricing, such as vaccines, billing software, and contract pharmacy vendors. As of April 2014, about 82% of covered entities participated in the PVP and accounted for $5 billion in 340B drug purchases, according to Apexus.⁷ DSH hospitals, children’s hospitals, and freestanding cancer hospitals that participate in 340B are prohibited from purchasing covered outpatient drugs through a group purchasing organization.

What the Hospitals Do With 340B Revenue

The premise of the 340B program is that the covered entities will use the revenue they earn to improve health care for low-income individuals and families in their communities. Mirga of 340B Health says nearly three-quarters (71%) of 340B Health members report that savings from participation in 340B increase their ability to provide free or discounted drugs to low-income patients. But it is not clear what levels of discounts are passed on to whom. No statistics on that exist. There is no denying that poor cancer patients at venues such as Dr. Kemeny’s Queens Cancer Center are able to obtain treatment at rock-bottom prices or for free. But the serious shortcomings of the program are starting to overshadow the “good” the program does.

Author bio: 

Mr. Barlas, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., covers topics inside the Beltway.

Formulary Policies a Battleground In HHS Proposal on Nondiscrimination

P&T Journal - March 2016 for the original online article go HERE.  

Are Tiering and Cost Sharing Civil Rights Issues?

Is the federal government once more on the cusp of tweaking rules for marketplace, Medicare, Medicaid, and other federally funded health programs with regard to formularies and P&T committees? It could happen. Patient advocacy groups and drug companies are pushing for more aggressive requirements with regard to things such as pharmaceutical cost sharing and utilization management techniques. Health insurers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are fighting against that.

The political venue for this is the proposed rule the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued last September on Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.^1,2 It bans discrimination in health care and jumps off from previous nondiscrimination laws in the areas of voting rights, education, access to facilities, and much else. Those earlier, existing laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability.

However, the upcoming nondiscrimination rule from the HHS has prompted concerns from various quarters for a couple of reasons. The proposed rule extends the definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination based on gender identity. It will also require hospitals, health plans, physician offices, pharmacies, state and local programs, and others to do some things they currently do not do under existing civil rights laws in terms of notification, training, and translation services for patients. The HHS estimates the industry-wide cost at $558 million over a two-year period.

Interestingly, the proposed rule nowhere mentions the application of Section 1557 to “formularies.” That word doesn’t appear anywhere in the proposed rule’s text. Neither does “P&T committee.” The proposal concerns itself with such issues as access to facilities for the disabled, translation services for non-English speakers, and how health plans, hospitals, and other providers must describe and provide medical services for transgender and gay individuals. That said, many, if not most, of the 2,000-plus comments that arrived on the HHS doorstep in the wake of the proposed rule raise, among other concerns, the issue of formularies, either pressing for extension of Section 1557 to formularies or opposing it.

“It is our understanding that the department continues to face pressure from several patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical manufacturers to prevent or severely restrict application of clinically based utilization management and formulary design processes under a pretext that use of step therapy, tiering, or other such tools are in fact discriminatory practices in and of themselves,” says Jonah Houts, Vice President of Corporate Government Affairs for Express Scripts, Inc.

Lisa Joldersma, Vice President of Policy and Research for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), says, “The evidence on today’s formulary landscape clearly indicates that too often plan formularies have designs that discourage individuals with certain disabilities from enrolling in their plans. Across HIV classes, certain cancer classes, and medicines that treat multiple sclerosis, many marketplace plans are putting all medicines, brand and generic, on the highest cost-sharing tier.”

Drug Access in Federal Health Plans Has Long Been a Controversy

The issue of formulary “discrimination” has come up over the past few years in the context of marketplace and Medicare Part D/Medicare Advantage guidance—which has no legal standing—and proposed rules dealing mostly with appeals to denials of particular drugs. Health plans have argued against the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) addressing tiering and cost-sharing requirements and are doing so again with regard to the proposed 1557 rule.

“We recommend revising the rule to provide specific safe harbors with respect to pharmacy benefits, so that formularies designed by a pharmacy and therapeutics committee would not be considered discriminatory,” says David Schwartz, Head of Global Policy for Cigna Federal Affairs. “CMS has already issued detailed rules on drug formularies and the department should defer to CMS’s rules to ensure uniform, clinically based, sound formulary decisions.”

Again, the only rules the CMS has issued on formularies deal with time frames for health plans to respond to appeals of denials of specific medications, mandating that all drugs be provided in certain “protected classes” of drugs, and, with regard to marketplace formularies, establishing the standard for which drug classes must be made available.

That is not to say the CMS and the HHS are not worried about drug cost-sharing policies adopted by health plans and how P&T committees arrive at those formularies. The CMS has already been doing an outlier analysis that assesses marketplace plans’ cost-sharing requirements. Year 2015 and 2016 “Letters to Issuers in the Federally-facilitated Marketplaces” sent by the CMS promised to perform “an outlier analysis on QHP [qualified health plan] cost sharing (e.g., co-payments and co-insurance) as part of the QHP certification application process.” Both letters go on to say that “outliers may be given the opportunity to modify cost sharing for certain benefits if CMS determines that the cost-sharing structure of the plan that was submitted for certification could have the effect of discouraging the enrollment of individuals with significant health needs.” QHPs are required to ensure nondiscrimination in each of the 10 categories of essential health benefits they must provide, one of which is prescription drugs. In that vein, the 2015 letter said, “CMS intends to review plans that are outliers based on an unusually large number of drugs subject to prior authorization and/or step therapy requirements in a particular category and class. We encourage states performing plan management functions in an FFM [federally facilitated marketplace] to implement this type of review.” ^3,4

The 2017 draft “letter” went further. It said: “CMS is also concerned about adverse tiering, which occurs when a formulary benefit design assigns most or all drugs in the same therapeutic class needed to treat a specific chronic, high-cost medical condition to a high cost-sharing tier. Since adverse tiering is potentially discriminatory, this review may examine the tier placement of prescription drugs to determine whether QHPs are also consistently placing drugs used to treat these medical conditions on a high cost-sharing tier.” ⁵

These “letters,” whether to marketplace health plan or Part D providers, are advisory. They do not have the force of law. Moreover, while the CMS has apparently been applying outlier analyses to federally regulated formularies, the agency has never published the results of these, nor published a list, for example, of “bad practices,” which might guide health plans.

Timothy Jost, Emeritus Professor at Washington and Lee University, who has written widely on federal health policy, notes that the CMS and states review marketplace and Part D plans annually and, if they feel an individual plan uses drug tiering in a discriminatory fashion, they can kick the plan back for remediation. Jost adds that where states review marketplace plans, “they are all over the lot” in how they enforce marketplace essential health benefit standards as they apply to pharmaceutical access.

The CMS has, however, established federal policies related to P&T committees operating in Medicare Part D plans. There is some concern among PBMs and health insurers that the HHS might extend those policies, or even enrich them, in the context of a final Section 1557 rule. “As we share the department’s priorities in preventing discriminatory practices from occurring in health care, our concern focuses on whether any future proposals affecting the P&T committee process will enhance the protections already available to patients, or add only complexity and costs to plan compliance at the expense of patients and sponsors,” says Express Script’s Houts.

First in its Call Letter for 2015 and again in its 2016 letter for Medicare Part D plans, the HHS laid out refinements of “independence” requirements for P&T committees. A minimum of two members on each P&T committee must be independent from the plan sponsor and drug manufacturers, but not the PBM. The 2016 letter, for example, required that the sponsor’s P&T committee clearly articulate and document processes to determine that members who are supposed to be independent are indeed independent, and committees must have a policy to manage recusals due to conflicts. Those processes must be enforced by “an objective party,” which may be a representative of the PBM—as long as that representative is not also a member of the sponsor’s P&T committee.

Jost believes the HHS may have its work cut out for it in applying Section 1557 to formularies and P&T committees. He believes nondiscrimination in the context of disabilities, as is the case with Section 1557, is different than nondiscrimination with regard to health status, which is what the marketplace plans are charged with avoiding. Also, the proposed rule doesn’t raise the issue of discriminatory formularies. “The HHS is limited in going off in a new direction if that direction is not mentioned in the proposed rule,” Jost explains. “But it could issue a final rule and another proposed rule dealing with formulary discrimination.”

Allyson Funk, Senior Director of Communications at PhRMA, thinks the HHS could and should apply Section 1557 to formularies. “We would like to see additional clarification in the final rule which would be a logical outgrowth of the proposed rule’s prohibition on ‘benefit designs that discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in a health-related insurance plan or policy, or other health-related coverage,’ ” she says.

Expansion of Current Nondiscrimination Policies ... or Not

Complaints about current discrimination have been loud from transgender advocacy groups, who have been among those pressing for formulary expansion provisions. But they have been equally concerned about availability of medical services. In the proposed rule, the HHS said “coverage for medically appropriate health services must be made available on the same terms for all individuals, regardless of sex assigned at birth, gender identity, or recorded gender.” It used pelvic exams as an example. They cannot be denied for an individual for whom a pelvic exam is medically appropriate based on the fact that the individual either identifies as a transgender man or is enrolled in the health plan as a man.

The HHS goes on to say that coverage cannot be denied for gender transition. If, for example, a health plan or state Medicaid agency denies a claim for coverage of a hysterectomy that a patient’s provider says is medically necessary to treat gender dysphoria, the HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR), if it gets a complaint, will evaluate the extent of the plan’s coverage of hysterectomies under other circumstances. The OCR will also carefully scrutinize whether the covered entity’s explanation for the denial or limitation of coverage for transition-related care is legitimate and not a pretext for discrimination. But the HHS makes it clear that a final rule will not require covered entities to cover any particular procedure or treatment for transition-related care; nor do they preclude a covered entity from applying neutral standards that govern the circumstances in which it will offer coverage to all its enrollees in a nondiscriminatory manner.

However, the HHS proposed policy on transgender access to services is not totally clear to everyone. “As it is currently worded, the proposed rule suggests that clinicians who recommend screening tests and similar services usually performed only on those of the individual’s birth gender may be acting in a prohibited manner. We do not believe this was HHS’s intention,” says Ashley Thompson, Acting Senior Executive of Policy at the American Hospital Association.

Nondiscrimination Beyond Medical Services

Whatever the HHS decides in the final rule, any edicts will affect not just the kinds of services that hospitals, physicians, and pharmacies will have to provide, but potentially even the continuation of certain federally funded health programs. For example, Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE) wants some federally funded health programs to be canceled because they do not square with Section 1557. It cites abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs currently funded by HHS and administered by the Family and Youth Services Bureau within the Administration for Children and Families. “AOUM programs are inherently discriminatory against LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer] young people,” says URGE. According to the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, “in addition to abstinence-only classes being unlikely to meet the health needs of LGBTQ youth, as they largely ignore issues surrounding homosexuality, they often stigmatize homosexuality as deviant and unnatural behavior.”

But insurance companies worry about how antidiscrimination laws newly applied to transgender individuals might adversely affect them. According to Cigna’s Schwartz:

While Cigna supports measures of diversity and inclusivity, there are operational procedures today that may be construed as violating Section 1557, albeit unintentionally. Claim adjudication programming helps to protect against abusive billing practices by using edits, such as gender identifiers, to identify an anomaly; such as a male gender indicator on a claim for an annual well-woman exam or a female gender edit for a prostate exam. Medical claim adjudication procedures as well as pharmacy claim adjudication procedures would be impacted by the proposed rule. Furthermore, based on the language in the proposed rule, it is unclear if a gender question on an application is even acceptable or if it could be construed as sex stereotyping.

Disability groups are concerned that Section 1557 regulations would allow private entities to essentially decide for themselves when their provider network is “readily accessible” to people with disabilities. “A large for-profit insurance carrier could arbitrarily decide that, among the great majority of its providers who operate in existing facilities, only 10% need to be physically accessible or have accessible equipment,” says the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities (CCD). “Moreover those accessible providers could be clustered together in some central location, and whenever a member calls member services and mentions the need for accessibility, that member will be actively directed toward ‘the accessible provider offices.’ ”

Groups representing the deaf also cite shortcomings in interpretation services currently available and thus the need for Section 1557 regulations to specify more rigorous requirements than those in the current nondiscrimination laws. “Too often, patients who use ASL [American Sign Language] are denied access to health care because most providers do not provide qualified ASL interpreters,” reports the National Association of the Deaf. “Furthermore, the department should emphasize that by no means should family members act as interpreter for the deaf or hard of hearing patient. Many health care entities mistakenly believe that it is perfectly acceptable to utilize family members as interpreters. In fact, the website for the American Medical Association states that ‘qualified interpreters may include: family members or friends,’ which demonstrates an incorrect understanding of the regulatory definition for a ‘qualified interpreter’ (QI).”

Implications for Pharmacies and Hospitals

As opposed to formularies, the Section 1557 proposed rule does have specific requirements for brick-and-mortar health facilities covered by the upcoming rule. They would have to notify patients that they offer auxiliary aids and services, free of charge, in a timely manner, to individuals with disabilities. The notice would need to be translated into at least 15 different languages.

Another requirement would force hospitals, pharmacies, and health plans to provide language assistance services, including interpreter and translation services for non-English speakers and similar services for the deaf. Those have to be available at the point a service is being provided.

In the case of an individual with limited English proficiency, the covered entity must offer that individual an on-the-spot, qualified, oral interpreter, who generally may not be a family member and almost never a child. There is an exception which is narrow in scope. Interpreters at a remote location can be used.
The American Pharmacists Association (APhA) is making the argument that pharmacies shouldn’t be covered (though hospital pharmacies, as part of a hospital’s corporate structure, would be) to the same extent as other “covered providers.” Retail pharmacies do not get marketplace, Medicare, or Medicaid reimbursement, though, in the latter case, they do receive dispensing fees. The APhA believes the amount of federal financial assistance a covered entity receives for a particular service should be a determinative or heavily weighted factor when imposing requirements related to Section 1557 and in OCR’s determinations related to nondiscrimination claims. Scaling down the requirements on pharmacies is important, in the APhA’s view, because of the mandates related to things such as translation services for customers, to give one example.

“APhA is very concerned that OCR requires the notice to include a statement that the covered entity provides auxiliary aid and services and language assistance services, free of charge, and makes no mention of the inclusion of a disclaimer or caveat related to the fact that the provision of services is balanced against the burden placed on the entity,” says Thomas E. Menighan, Executive Vice President and CEO of APhA. “Such a notice basically provides a guarantee of the services and fails to factor in the burden on the entity which OCR claims to consider.”

Pharmacies currently providing translation services (written or oral) have noted that costs may be considerable. Additionally, written translation services are effective only if the patient is literate. Pharmacists may also have difficulty identifying which language the patient is speaking, further exacerbating the difficulty of connecting the patient to a qualified QI. Even if a QI can be found, those without the appropriate medical training may be unable to accurately translate technical information, making such services less meaningful to patients and a source of potential liability for pharmacies.

At least hospitals and pharmacies know what they are in for when the Section 1557 final rule is published. The rule’s impact on QHP and Part D formularies is harder to predict. The political pressure has been building on the HHS to take a stronger stand on tiering and associated practices. But given the very recent disclosures of the money major health insurers are losing on their marketplace plans, it may be hard to justify putting out of reach what the plans have long argued are major, justifiable cost-control practices.

Author bio: 

Mr. Barlas, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., covers topics inside the Beltway.

340B Guidance Riles Hospitals, Drug Makers

P&T Journal - February 2016 - for the original online article go HERE.

They Push in Opposite Ways on Eligibility, Discounts, and More

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) may have gotten it more right than wrong with its new proposed guidance on the 340B outpatient drug program.¹ Hospitals and drug manufacturers, the program’s two key constituencies—long at loggerheads—are both complaining to high heaven about proposed changes. The program requires drug companies to sell medicines at deep discounts to hospitals (generally those located in rural or poor areas with significant indigent populations) that use those discounts to fund medical services they couldn’t otherwise afford.

The guidance, which may be revised based on public comments, greatly reduces the number of patients who would qualify to purchase 340B drugs. That has enraged hospitals and buoyed pharmaceutical companies. But the guidance proposed in August does very little to crack down on how hospitals use contract pharmacies, to prevent duplicate discounts where drug companies can be billed once for the 340B discount and again for a Medicaid discount, and to prevent private hospitals with no local or state government contracts from participating in the program. The HRSA’s failure to propose such restrictions is just fine with hospitals, but drug companies are beside themselves because of those and other omissions.

The 340B program is controversial, and some of its requirements are sketchy. The HRSA, part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has been prohibited by federal courts from issuing legally binding regulations in all but a few areas—hence the guidance the HRSA published in an attempt to clear up confusion about program rules. It would change the standard for patient eligibility, make it more difficult for patients receiving infusion to qualify for drugs, require hospitals to implement new billing and tracking systems, and make other changes. However, guidance, as opposed to regulation, is not legally enforceable.

Upward of 2,000 covered entities—general, rural, and children’s hospitals and AIDS and rural clinics—buy drugs from nearly 650 manufacturers. The drugs are sold at discounts of around 25% to qualified patients who receive the drugs at outpatient pharmacies, either on the grounds of the hospital or at satellite locations, including nonaffiliated contract pharmacies. Covered entities make money because insured patients buy the drugs at discounted prices and the covered entity bills their insurance company for the full price of the drug, pocketing the difference between that price and the lower, discounted 340B price. Over the years, the program rules have been abused both by covered entities and drug manufacturers, each side says, and the HHS inspector general has confirmed their suspicions— hence the need for clarification.

The key change riling hospitals concerns the way the HRSA would limit the number of patients eligible to purchase 340B drugs. The HRSA wants to substitute a six-pronged test for the current three-pronged test. The new standard would restrict the number of physicians who could write 340B-eligible prescriptions. Even if they were somehow affiliated with a hospital, physicians who did their own billing could not write a 340B-eligible script. Physicians would have to be employed by the hospital; having “privileges” would not meet the test. The guidance would limit the covered-entity facilities where individuals could be seen and still fit the definition of “patient.” For example, outpatient facilities would have to be listed on a reimbursable line in the hospital’s most recently filed Medicare cost report and the services provided would have to have associated outpatient Medicare costs and charges. An inpatient who receives a prescription while in the hospital, from an eligible provider, could not go to his or her local pharmacy and qualify for a 340B prescription.

“The guidance would require every prescription to pass at least 10 requirements to qualify for 340B discounts,” says Bruce Siegel, MD, President and CEO of America’s Essential Hospitals, which represents 340B hospitals. “The test must be applied to each prescription written and depends on where an individual patient sought care for a particular medical condition, which clinician wrote the prescription, and what type of insurance, if any, the patient has. This would be disastrous for patients and providers.”

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) wants the HRSA to narrow the requirements for hospitals to qualify as covered entities. Over the past few years, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has questioned whether academic medical centers are using 340B revenue for purposes intended by Congress, and whether they ought to qualify given their upscale patient mix. So PhRMA wants the HRSA to require private, nonprofit hospitals that have a contract with a state or local government to provide “at least a specified amount of care to low-income people ineligible for Medicare and Medicaid with the specified minimum threshold selected so as to ensure that a minor contract to care for this population cannot confer 340B eligibility.”

The HRSA guidance appears to try to split the difference between the demands of two opposing interest groups. But given its failure to do that successfully, and the fact that guidance is only guidance, Congress is likely to step in. If so, it is not clear which side of the scale Congress will put its thumb on.

Author bio: 

Mr. Barlas, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., covers topics inside the Beltway.

Generic Prices Take Flight

P&T Journal - December 2014 - for a PDF copy of the published version go HERE.

The FDA Is Struggling to Ground Them

Over the past few years, safety and effectiveness have been the issues plaguing generic pharmaceuticals. But concern has largely faded about the quality of active pharmaceutical ingredients manufactured in places such as India or China, or the bioequivalence of products such as Budeprion XL 300 mg. Now a new series of question marks hovers over generic drugs.

The price of generics looms largest. Still prized for their low cost, some generics have lifted off into the dollar stratosphere—though admittedly they haven’t reached the moonlike some new brand-name drugs, such as Gilead’s Sovaldi. That said, the number of generics posting higher prices, and the height of those leaps, worry consumers, payers, and some members of Congress.

A variety of reasons account for the increases. Loss of momentary competition in a category because one manufacturer stops producing, for any number of reasons, comes into play. So does the dropping of product lines. New products in existing generic markets find the door to entry barred, sometimes by competitors already selling into that market, sometimes by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) besieged by applications and understaffed to handle them.

The FDA must approve abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs) filed by generic drug companies, and the agency was thought to be making big strides in light of $300 million a year in new user fees from generic companies thanks to the 2012 Generic Drug User Fee Amendments (GDUFA). The fees were supposed to guarantee faster approval, leading to lower costs to companies and lower prices for new drugs that would be introduced more quickly.¹ But some industry experts think that GDUFA has failed to deliver, and that the FDA has gone backward on approval speed.

Walter Jump, President of Cornerstone Regulatory (a consulting firm that works with both generic and brand-name companies), says that costs for industry have increased since the passage of GDUFA. “Nothing provided for in GDUFA will decrease costs to industry. Although the Generic Drug User Fee Amendments propose to reduce the current delays in the drug approval process, currently there is no proof that the delays in the current approval process are being addressed,” Jump says. In fact, the FDA’s ANDA backlog has increased. Currently, Mylan Inc. has 288 ANDAs awaiting FDA approval that represent $111.5 billion in annual brand sales, according to IMS Health. Forty-three of these pending ANDAs are potential first-to-file opportunities, representing $28.7 billion in annual brand sales for the 12 months ending June 30, 2014, IMS Health adds.

During a meeting at the FDA on September 17, 2014, called to air a number of GDUFA issues, David R. Gaugh, RPh, Senior Vice President for Sciences and Regulatory Affairs of the Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA), said that in 2013, the median time for generic drug approvals jumped to 36 months and is projected to reach 43 months in 2014 once the final numbers are in.

Jump hypothesizes that the slowdown in approval times may be related in part to the need for more-experienced FDA drug reviewers to spend part of their time training new drug reviewers who have been hired thanks to the $300 million infusion. Such training will take time to ensure that all these new employees are consistent in their reviews.

“The generic supply chain has become very fragile. For many generic drugs, there are only a few suppliers,” says Adam J. Fein, PhD, of Pembroke Consulting, Inc. “Any supply shock to the system, such as a manufacturing problem or FDA action, can rapidly create a shortage because alternative capacity isn’t ramping up to meet demand.”

Tetracycline shortages, for instance, have resulted in much higher generic prices. Watson Pharmaceuticals stopped producing tetracycline tablets in December 2013 and was acquired by Activis PLC in 2014. Activis has not restarted production. As of October 2014, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., a one-time producer of tetracycline, was no longer selling the product because of a raw material shortage. Heritage Pharmaceuticals Inc. markets the brand-name version of tetracycline, called Achromycin V. In October 2013, Heritage announced it was making available generic tetracycline HCl capsules in 250- and 500-mg strengths. Not surprisingly, then, with only one manufacturer in the game, the price of tetracycline 500-mg and 250-mg tablets increased from $0.05 and $0.06 per capsule in July 2013 to $8.59 and $4.26 in July 2014. Those are increases of 17,714% and 7,340%, based on pricing data from Drug Channels, a website written by Dr. Fein.²

The Importance of Generics

The importance of generics to slowing the growth of health care costs is obvious. The FDA has approved more than 8,000 generic equivalents to brand-name drugs; as a result, generics represent more than 85% of all U.S. prescriptions and have saved U.S. consumers and the health care system $1.5 trillion in the past decade alone, according to the GPhA.

For years, the discounted price of generics was the glittering jewel in their crown. Not any more. Escalating prices have hit hospital pharmacies, drug stores, and consumers alike. This year, Walgreens fired its chief financial officer and the president of its pharmacy, health, and wellness division because they underestimated the cost of generic drugs and overestimated pharmacy unit earnings for the fiscal year ending in 2016.

Insurance plans are responding in order to mitigate the price pressures. Dr. Fein states, “Some payers are already establishing a ‘nonpreferred’ or ‘more costly’ generic tier for products that have experienced significant inflation. If generic inflation continues, I expect to see more plans with multiple generic tiers.”

Hospitals are suffering from generic drug price increases, too, since drug costs for any inpatient “event” are bundled into the cost of reimbursement for that patient, whether Medicare, Medicaid, or a private insurer is paying. Any generic drug price increase will not be reflected in the global payment from private or public insurers, paid on the basis of a diagnosis-related group (DRG)—at least not any time soon. True, generic costs make up a tiny percentage of any DRG reimbursement. But over the course of a year, they may add up. Hospitals also face potential cost implications on the outpatient pharmacy side. “The average selling price for the generic will not be updated for up to six months after the actual price increase, meaning hospitals will have to pay the difference for that six-month period,” explains Bill Woodward, MS, RPh, Senior Director of Pharmacy Contracting for Novation, a contracting and information company that serves 100,000 members and affiliates of VHA Inc. and UHC, two national health care alliances; Children’s Hospital Association, an alliance of the nation’s leading pediatric facilities; and Provista, LLC.

Generic price increases have caught the attention of some in Congress. On October 2, Representative Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Senator Bernard Sanders, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, sent letters to 14 generic drug manufacturers requesting information about the escalating prices they have been charging for generic drugs.³ “When you see how much the prices of these drugs have increased just over the past year, it’s staggering, and we want to know why,” says Cummings.

Huge Generic Price Increases

In their letters, Cummings and Sanders cited data from the Healthcare Supply Chain Association on purchases of 10 generic drugs by group purchasing organizations for which prices have skyrocketed in the past year. Among the citations:

• Albuterol sulfate, used to treat asthma and other lung conditions, increased 4,014% in price, from $11 to $434 for a bottle of 100 2-mg tablets.
• Doxycycline hyclate, an antibiotic used to treat a variety of infections, increased 8,281% in price for a bottle of 500 100-mg tablets (from $20 to $1,849).
• Glycopyrrolate, used to prevent irregular heartbeats during surgery, increased 2,728% in price for a box of 10 0.2-mg/mL, 20-mL vials (from $65 to $1,277).

It doesn’t appear that any of the 10 drugs cited in the letters are marketed by only one company, so competition should keep prices from breaking through the roof. But in some instances, that competition is limited. Albuterol sulfate is sold by Mylan and Mutual Pharmaceuticals. Doxycycline hyclate is sold by 10 companies, with three representing most of the market share. West-Ward, Inc., dominates the market for glycopyrrolate.

Mylan, Teva, and Lannett Company, Inc., are among the companies that received the Cummings/Sanders letter. The first two did not respond to a query asking for a response. In its 2013 annual report, Lannett said: “Gross profit improved considerably to $57 million from $39 million. As a percent of net sales, gross margin rose to 38% from 32%, with the increase primarily due to favorable sales mix, price increases, and enhanced manufacturing efficiencies.” Asked about the extent of product price increases, spokesman Robert Jaffe says, “Lannett’s management respectfully declines to be interviewed.”

Why the Price Hikes?

A number of factors can cause a spike in a generic price, justifiable or perhaps not. There are also reasons why drug prices won’t drop. A number of mega-consolidations have taken place in the industry over the past few years. One by one, generic companies are disappearing. Competition in each category is diminishing. Earlier this year, Mylan acquired Agila Specialties Private Ltd., giving Mylan a strong hold on the generic injectables market. In that instance, the FDA forced Mylan to divest drugs in a number of categories before it approved the acquisition. For example, Mylan divested etomidate injection, ganciclovir injection, and some other injectables to JHP Pharmaceuticals. Earlier this year, Par Pharmaceutical Companies, Inc., acquired JHP. Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Inc., is trying to acquire Allergan, Inc., and promises, if successful, to put a plug in its research pipeline. Teva acquired Cephalon, Inc., in 2012. Also in 2012, Valeant bought Ortho Dermatologics, Inc., from Johnson & Johnson and Dermik Laboratories, Inc., from Sanofi.

New products are not entering the market as quickly as had been hoped in the wake of GDUFA passage. And when they do enter the market, it is after the manufacturer has spent more in development and regulatory costs than might otherwise have been necessary. The GDUFA was supposed to pave the way for eliminating ANDA approval backlogs by mandating, for the first time, that generic suppliers pay “user fees” to the FDA. In return, the agency committed to approving ANDAs—submitted when a generic company wants to sell a copy of a patented pharmaceutical—according to specified time frames. The fees amount to about $300 million a year. The GDUFA required the FDA to publish five guidance documents that lay out how the agency planned to meet the approval deadlines in its GDUFA “commitment letter.” For example, the FDA has committed to review and act on 90% of original ANDA submissions within 10 months from the date of submission in year 5 of the program, which begins on October 1, 2016.

Of course, generic companies themselves are responsible for many delays. They fight like Hatfields and McCoys over whether one or the other should have its ANDA approved, whether as the “first-time” generic in a category or as a new competitor to an existing generic. One example is Apotex Corporation’s filing of a citizen petition with the FDA in January 2014 to block Forest Laboratories’ generic version of Apotex’s Namenda XR (memantine hydrochloride extended release capsules). The Apotex drug was approved in June 2010 and first became available in June 2013. Apotex argued that since its drug only became available in June 2013, it would have been impossible, time-wise, for Forest to conduct the required bioequivalence studies. The FDA rejected the petition on June 12, 2014. Ross Maclean, PhD, Senior Vice President for Scientific and Regulatory Affairs at Apotex, did not return a call asking for comment.

In filing its citizen petition, Apotex was trying to prevent Forest from claiming 180-day market exclusivity, which has price implications, too. (Forest disappeared last February when it was swallowed by Actavis). The 180-day period was put into law in 1984 as part of the Hatch-Waxman Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984. It is supposed to function as an incentive for a generic company to be the first to submit an ANDA for a brand-name drug coming off patent. Since GDUFA was signed into law, at least 19 first applicants have forfeited 180-day exclusivity because they failed to get timely FDA approval, according to the GPhA. Typically, once a paragraph IV ANDA is filed, a 30-month clock starts if the brand-name company challenges the generic company’s right to sell a product because of patent infringement. If the FDA fails to review an ANDA prior to the expiration of the patent being challenged, the 180-day exclusivity may be lost. With the patent or patents expired, any generic company can sell a copy of that brand-name drug. So that 180-day “incentive” is not much of an incentive these days.

The confusion over exclusivity can affect pricing in opposite directions. Michael D. Shumsky, an attorney for Kirkland and Ellis, LLP, and an outside counsel to Teva, explains that if a first generic applicant believes it is entitled to exclusivity, it typically will produce enough product to satisfy the entire market. But it could wind up with substantial inventories that it will never be able to sell if the FDA subsequently holds that the applicant is not entitled to exclusivity. The resulting losses are then passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, which undermines the statute’s basic goal of lowering prescription drug costs.

The reverse is also true. If a first generic applicant believes that the FDA will find it has forfeited or otherwise lost its exclusivity, it may not prepare sufficient quantities of a product to supply the market—leaving it unable to fulfill consumer demand in the event that the FDA finds the applicant has maintained its eligibility for exclusivity. That likewise increases costs for consumers.

The GDUFA: Promises and Pitfalls

The 180-day exclusivity period and the FDA’s policies for granting it were among the topics on the agenda of the FDA’s September 17 meeting. Also up for discussion were the five draft guidance documents the agency has issued as follow-ups to its GDUFA commitment letter. At the time of the GDUFA’s passage in 2012, more than 2,700 generic applications were awaiting FDA approval, and the average approval time for an application stretched beyond 30 months—five times longer than the statutory six-month review time called for by the Hatch-Waxman Act. That backlog had been reduced to about 2,100 when Greg Giba announced his departure as director of the FDA’s Office of Generic Drugs (OGD) in March 2013. Giba, whose appointment had been announced only the previous July, quit because a reorganization left him with less resources than he felt he needed. A new permanent director has not been appointed.

But the ANDA backlog (Figure 1) remains a cause célèbre for the generics industry. So does its impact on company costs, which affects product pricing. The FDA has said several times that one objective of GDUFA was to reduce costs to generic manufacturers. But Jump, of Cornerstone Regulatory, says that costs for industry have increased since GDUFA’s passage:

In fact, since the law has gone into effect, user fees have been instituted, requirements for the production and submission of three registration batches for each product strength, and the refusal to accept stability data with less than six months of stability data have all increased the costs to industry. The potential for earlier approvals, which has not been seen to date, can at best only potentially increase industry revenue, but it cannot decrease development costs.

The September 17 meeting, held as the October 1, 2014, start of the first iteration of GDUFA timetables was looming, touched on five guidance documents the FDA had issued in draft form. They are supposed to give the industry a clearer idea of what the FDA expects in an ANDA in various areas. The five guidance documents are:

• ANDA Submissions—Content and Format of ANDAs⁴
• ANDA Submissions—Refuse to Receive for Lack of Proper Justification of Impurity Limits⁵
• ANDA Submissions—Amendments and Easily Correctable Deficiencies Under GDUFA⁶
• ANDA Submissions—Prior Approval Supplements Under GDUFA⁷
• Controlled Correspondence Related to Generic Drug Development⁸

Most of these draft guidances were published this past summer. They are too mind-numbingly arcane to discuss here. Suffice it to say that the response to most of the draft guidance documents has not been particularly positive. With regard to “Content and Format of ANDAs,” Jump complains, for example, that his clients “are dismayed” that the FDA is requesting that the cover letter contain the same information contained in the common technical document (CTD) and the 356h form. This is an unnecessary duplication of information. “Repeating the same information in multiple places only increases the chances that inadvertent mistakes can be made,” Jump states. “These inadvertent mistakes are frequently the cause of deficiency comments from the agency asking which information is correct.” The CTD is the international format for what should be included in the ANDA. For instance, manufacturing site and contact information are requested in the FDA 356h form and specific sections defined within the ANDA. Now companies will have to include that same data in a third place, the cover letter, increasing the chances that there may be inadvertent discrepancies among the three. An FDA reviewer might kick back the application for that reason.

The problem these days is that reviewers aren’t “kicking out” approved applications. “I agree there are some major issues at the Office of Generic Drugs,” says Bob Pollock, Senior Advisor and Outside Director to the board of Lachman Consultants. Pollock, who left the FDA in 1994 as Acting Deputy Director of the OGD, writes a blog on the Lachman website. “One thing that surprises me is that there is more emphasis on process, policy, and procedure. They also need more attention to moving the freight. Folks in the industry are scratching their heads, wondering when things are going to improve.”

Author bio: 

Mr. Barlas, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., covers topics inside the Beltway.

Hospitals Struggle With ACA Challenges

P&T Journal - September 2014 - for a PDF copy of the published version go HERE.

More Regulatory Changes Are in the Offing in 2015

The results released on July 10, 2014, by CareFirst of Maryland, a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan, probably had some Maryland hospitals shaking in their boots. It wouldn’t be surprising if hospitals around the country felt the vibrations.

CareFirst was reporting for the first time on the results of its patient-centered medical home (PCMH) program, which the insurer initiated three years ago. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a formal PCMH pilot program within Medicare, and insurers in the commercial market who aren’t part of the pilot, such as CareFirst, have been experimenting with the concept too. A PCMH program pays physicians incentives to monitor the health of their patients more closely, with the objective of minimizing referrals to specialists and hospital admissions. Members seen by medical home physicians participating in the CareFirst program experienced 6% fewer hospital admissions, 11% fewer days in the hospital, and 11% fewer outpatient visits than other CareFirst clients last year.¹

The PCMH is just one of the ACA initiatives aimed at reducing hospital admissions and, by extension, hospital revenue. The ACA’s emphasis on primary care as a bulwark against hospitalization, and its endorsement of accountable care organizations (ACOs) and bundled payments, is having, and will continue to have, a major impact on hospital revenue—in some cases not in a good way, speeding hospital consolidations and closures. Stephen Schimpff, MD, retired Chief Executive Officer of the University of Maryland Medical Center, puts it this way:

It is a changing world for hospitals; it is harder to thrive in the way in which it was done in the past. We used to be in the business of disease and pestilence, the more disease and pestilence the better. Now we are in a totally different business, improving the health of your community.

But the ACA has been something of a double-edged sword. While its payment initiatives are staunching the flow of patients to hospitals, its insurance expansion has opened the spigot. The ACA’s Medicaid expansion has sent waves of people through hospital doors in some states. Many of them were previously “self pay”—with some percentage being “no pay”—and hospitals are suddenly being compensated for their care. The health insurance marketplaces have brought eight million customers, not all of them newcomers, to hospital doors. However, hospitals have had to contend with the pricing demands of qualified health plans (QHPs), which sell individual health plans and must comply with federal rules, some of which filter down to hospitals.

The Revolution Gathers Steam

Just as the application of steam power to manufacturing in Great Britain in the mid-1700s ignited the industrial revolution, the 2010 passage of the ACA has prompted an emerging upheaval in health care. Traditional hospital operations across a broad range of activities have been upended and are being refashioned.

Hospitals are merging at a pace previously unseen, buying insurance companies (and being bought by insurance companies), and piling into “clinically integrated networks” faster than high school seniors jumping into beach-bound cars on the last day of school. Health systems are also buying physician practices to establish PCMHs or ACOs, or simply to have a better footing to contend with insurance companies outside of Medicare that are requiring some form of risk-based “value,” “bundled,” or “capitated” purchasing contract—terms that are being tossed around with varying meanings.

“At the strategic level, the Affordable Care Act has certainly colored the internal dialog at Catholic Health Initiatives [CHI] around the positioning of our health system and our markets,” says Juan Serrano, Senior Vice President of Payer Strategy and Operations at CHI, which owns about 90 hospitals around the country. CHI has about 15 hospitals participating in the Shared Savings Program at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The Shared Savings Program is an ACO option, a companion to the smaller, more radical Pioneer ACO program. Both programs promote what has come to be called “value purchasing,” in which Medicare and Medicaid, and an increasing number of commercial insurers, pay hospitals for integrated clinical care. There were 32 Pioneer ACOs and about 350 hospitals in the Shared Savings Program. Only two organizations have terminated Medicare ACOs, while seven have shifted from the Pioneer program (in which they must assume “downside” risk for losses) to the more financially forgiving Shared Savings Program, which permits one-sided (bonus-only) financial arrangements.

About 100 hospitals participate in the Medicare bundled payments pilot program, which is another product of the ACA. Medicare has also begun testing PCMHs, although the CMS had been experimenting with the concept prior to ACA passage. The demonstration program kicked off in 2011. It pays a monthly care management fee for beneficiaries receiving primary care from a designated medical group. The care management fee is intended to cover care coordination, improved access, patient education, and other services to support chronically ill patients. The program is operating in select states, and like other ACA programs it has sent ripples into the commercial marketplace, where companies such as CareFirst have inaugurated their own programs. The idea is to keep patients from being referred to specialists at hospitals, where care is more expensive.

While “clinical integration” and “value purchasing” have become watchwords in the hospital industry thanks to the ACA, the law has also prompted some hospitals to look outward, beyond their normal operational borders, particularly in terms of capitalizing on the eight million entrants into the federal and state health insurance marketplaces. As a result, hospitals are slowly moving into the health insurance business. CHI recently purchased QualChoice, a health insurance company based in Arkansas. Serrano says the purchase may become a platform for CHI to offer plans in the state and federal marketplaces. “The purchase of QualChoice allows us to accelerate our value delivery to the market; it gives us a distribution channel for our products and new models of care: for example, new disease management programs and narrow networks,” he states.

Some hospitals participate in the ACO and bundled payment programs simultaneously. “We are working with both health systems that have bundles with CMS, and with health systems that have bundles with CMS while at the same time participating in the Medicare Shared Savings Program,” explains Morgan Bridges-Guthrie, a spokeswoman for Premier, Inc., which provides buying, data, and other services to hospitals. “So, ACOs instituting bundled payment programs is a natural fit.”
Hospital executives will need to be even more nimble next year as ACA programs continue to morph. The QHPs that sell individual policies in federal and state insurance marketplaces face new requirements in 2015, some of which affect hospitals. In addition, the CMS will rework its ACO program, both the narrow Pioneer and broader Shared Savings models.

Debate Over ACA Shifts to New Issues

The debate about the ACA seems to have morphed since spring 2014. Then, there were questions about whether the eight million people the Obama administration had forecast would enroll in federal and state marketplaces would actually show up. When they did, the question became whether all of the new entrants would pay their premiums and actually get coverage. Most did. Competing studies by national organizations have offered differing results about what percentage of that eight million (or whatever the final 2014 number turns out to be) were previously uninsured. That was the whole point of the ACA, to insure the uninsured. But even the fire over that question has died down.

Interestingly, no one seems too concerned that 90% of marketplace participants are receiving federal subsidies for their premiums and that those premiums average 75%. Maybe those federal costs are less than what taxpayers were paying for the portion of the eight million who were previously costing hospitals money in the form of uncompensated care. However, a report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general in July said that at the end of 2013, the federal marketplace (13 states have their own marketplaces) had 2.9 million inconsistencies relating to an applicant’s income status and Social Security number.²

It is probably because of the federal subsidies that QHPs, having offered reasonable premiums for the four plan levels (bronze, silver, gold, and platinum) in 2014 while they got a feel for the costs of covering essential health benefits, now feel free to jack up 2015 premiums. Companies began filing 2015 premiums with HHS this summer; they take effect on January 1, 2015. The Wall Street Journal in June looked at potential 2015 premium increases in 10 states and found that the largest carriers were proposing increases of 8% to 22.8%.³ These proposed increases may not stick: Both the states and HHS have the power to negotiate lower rates. But it seems clear that a certain percentage of marketplace participants will switch to lower-priced plans using more constricted networks. This will put even more pressure on hospitals.

A New World for Hospitals

That uncertainty aside, some trends now seem immutable. In the name of clinical integration, some of the biggest hospital companies, such as CHI and Ascension Health, have been adding hospitals and considering buying insurance companies. The not-for-profit Denver-based CHI system, which provides health care services in 18 states, assumed control of several hospitals and a health system and purchased a majority interest in a physician-owned health plan last year.

In the reverse scenario, health insurers are buying hospitals. Highmark Inc., one of the biggest Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans in the country, in 2013 bought the West Penn Allegheny health system, which boasts eight hospitals in western Pennsylvania. Highmark offers marketplace and nonmarketplace policies in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia, and is the only marketplace carrier in the third state. Spokesman Aaron Billger says Highmark’s acquisition of the West Penn hospitals was not done with marketplace leverage in mind. Rather, the hospitals provide Highmark with a platform to create an integrated delivery network—called the Allegheny Health Network—that serves as an ACO/PCMH-type destination for the 218,000 policyholders (marketplace and nonmarketplace) in western Pennsylvania.

Highmark’s ACO program is not a part of either Medicare model, so it illustrates how the commercial insurance marketplace is picking up the ACA ball and running with it. There were 147,000 Highmark-insured individuals whose physician practices were members of the Highmark Accountable Care Alliance between October 2012 and October 2013. In clinical quality performance measures, those practices showed a 26% improvement in quality scores and a reduction in medical costs, with total six-months savings of about $11.5 million.

ACA Impact on Hospital Financial Health Unclear

This scurrying by hospitals to capitalize on the new ACA programs has had an uneven financial impact on them. A June Modern Healthcare analysis of earnings reports for about 200 hospitals and health systems, both not-for-profit and investor-owned, found that hospital margins narrowed significantly last year despite an improving economy.⁴ The magazine wrote: “Despite a buoyant stock market streak by some publicly traded chains, health care providers as a group continue to operate with slim and shrinking margins. Overall, a smaller percentage of health care providers saw positive operating margins last year compared with the previous two years.”

The Modern Healthcare analysis found that the average operating margin in 2013 was 3.1%, down from 3.6% in 2012 based on data available for 179 health systems, which included acute-care, post-acute-care, rehabilitation, and specialty hospital groups and some stand-alone hospitals. A total of 61.3% of organizations in the Modern Healthcare analysis saw their operating margins deteriorate over the previous year.

Probably the best news for many hospital systems is the influx of Medicaid patients, via the ACA Medicaid expansion. For example, LifePoint Hospitals reported a 14% increase in net income in the first quarter of 2014. That is based on just seven of LifePoint’s 20 states expanding Medicaid, although 35% of its self-pay volume was generated in those states in 2013. About 22% of its self-pay patients during the first quarter had enrolled in Medicaid, and 3% had enrolled in an exchange plan—on the high end of previous expectations. Diane Huggins, Vice President of Communications at LifePoint, says not all of the gain in net income came from treating new Medicaid recipients. “Clearly, there were a confluence of factors that impacted our Q1 2014 results compared to the same quarter of the prior year in addition to Medicaid expansion,” she states.

There has been little analysis of how ACOs have specifically affected hospitals, which are just one member of an ACO team that depends heavily on physician practices as, for want of a better term, quarterbacks. However, hospitals are the key team member because they drive shared savings via better quality care that results in fewer hospital readmissions. The only financial results issued so far by the CMS were in July 2013 for the 32 Pioneer ACOs.⁵ Thirteen of the 32 produced shared savings with CMS, generating a gross savings of $87.6 million in 2012 and saving nearly $33 million for the Medicare Trust Funds. Overall, Pioneer ACOs performed better than published rates in fee-for-service Medicare for all 15 clinical quality measures for which comparable data are available. Medicare has not published any comparable results for the Pioneer programs in 2013 or for the much larger Shared Savings ACO program.

The Pioneer results are partly encouraging and partly not. Some hospitals earned substantial profits. Others turned themselves inside out to no avail. “We’ve spent a lot of money and haven’t shown much progress on the revenue side,” said Richard Barasch, Chairman and CEO of Universal American Corp., at an investor conference in June. “There’s a limit to our public service feelings about this. We are going to scale it back to some degree.” Universal has 34 ACOs and is one of the biggest players in the ACO world. Most of its ACOs participate in the Shared Savings Program.
The CMS has not published financial results or health outcomes from its Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative. Its four bundled payment models allow providers to bid as a team to provide a continuum of services for a predetermined target amount to include physician payment, nursing-home care, surgery, and other care, most commonly for treatments such as heart, colon, and spinal surgery, as well as hip and knee replacements.

The Premier, Inc., Bundled Payment Collaborative includes 17 health care provider systems with more than 45 hospitals across the nation. Members of the collaborative are committed to sharing best practices and data with each other. They focus on improving care and reducing costs across multiple episodes of care, including hip and knee joint replacements, lumbar spinal fusions, coronary artery bypass grafts, heart valve replacements, congestive heart failure, percutaneous coronary interventions, and colon resections.

“We haven’t charted the financial impact yet,” Premier’s Bridges-Guthrie explains when asked how the Premier bundled payments participants have fared so far. “Our Bundled Payment Collaborative members went live beginning of January, so it is a bit too early to tell real results versus estimates. At this time, we only have partial results. Unfortunately, it’s just too early to know performance.”

Changes in ACA Programs on the Way

Even as hospitals try to gain traction in current ACA programs, some of those programs will be changing. The CMS was supposed to publish a proposed rule in May 2014 detailing changes it wants to make in the Shared Savings Program. That proposal had not been issued as of mid-July. But just the prospect of the proposed rule forced the American Hospital Association (AHA) to launch a pre-emptive strike in the form of a long letter to Patrick Conway, MD, Acting Director of the CMS Innovation Center. In that letter, Linda E. Fishman, Senior Vice President of Public Policy Analysis and Development, said the AHA continues to have “significant concerns about the design of the current Pioneer ACO Model and the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP).”⁶

The two programs are similar in many regards, although the Pioneer program offers greater potential rewards to participants for greater savings. Both the Pioneer and Shared Savings ACOs enroll Medicare recipients and accept “risk.” Payment is based on traditional fee-for-service (FFS) in the first two years, but Pioneer ACOs can transition to population-based payment after that if “results” warrant the transition. Population-based payment is per-beneficiary-per-month compensation intended to replace some or all of the ACO’s FFS payments. The CMS also requires that 50% of Pioneer revenue come from participating in “risk” contracts with other payers by the end of the second performance period.

The AHA wants a laundry list of changes, as does the American Medical Group Association (AMGA), whose members—larger physician group practices—typically drive the ACOs, which almost always include hospitals. Fishman’s letter to Dr. Conway complained that the Pioneer ACO and MSSP programs place too much risk and burden on providers with too little opportunity for reward in the form of shared savings. She made a number of suggestions for changes to improve the programs, all of them technical and all of them practically requiring a doctorate in statistics to understand for anyone not steeped in ACO terminology and methodology. Suffice it to say that the AMGA has some of the same concerns about requirements, for example, attached to the minimum savings rate (MSR) for ACOs. The MSR accounts for the potential random variation in savings that may not be linked to improvements in quality and efficiency.

The QHPs already have new rules to follow in 2015, those established by the so-called “2015 Letter to Issuers in the Federally-facilitated Marketplaces.” ⁷ One change drills down to hospitals and opens up new liability: the first-time imposition of civil money penalties (CMPs) for any breach of federal rules by any party, including consumer assistance entities such as hospitals. When the draft letter was published, the AHA argued that applying CMPs to individual and institutional assisters, especially voluntary certified application counselors (CACs), would have a chilling effect on some hospitals continuing to serve in that role. It wanted the CMS to reconsider the application of CMPs to voluntary assisters, and to limit CMPs in general to egregious violations of selected requirements in which there are no other enforcement mechanisms already in place. Otherwise, hospitals could be penalized for simple human errors of judgment or facts that are unintentional, nonmalicious, and consistent with the purpose of the ACA—to provide coverage to the uninsured.

The CMS seems to have ignored the AHA’s pleas, so hospitals may have to tiptoe around efforts to sign up federal marketplace customers. Some hospitals may trip over sign-ups or other impediments suddenly strewn in their path thanks to the ACA. But some hospitals will prosper, too, as they figure out how to make this revolution work for them.

Author bio: 

Mr. Barlas, a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C., covers topics inside the Beltway.

References

1. CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield. 2013;PCMH program performance report. July 102014;Available at: https://member.carefirst.com/carefirst-resources/pdf/pcmh-program-performance-report-2013.pdf. Accessed July 14, 2014
2. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General Marketplaces faced early challenges resolving inconsistencies with applicant data. June 2014;Available at: http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-01-14-00180.pdf. Accessed July 14, 2014
3. Radnofsky L. Premiums rise at big insurers, fall at small rivals under health law. Wall Street Journal June 182014;Available at: http://online.wsj.com/articles/premiums-rise-at-big-insurers-fall-at-small-rivals-under-health-law-1403135040. Accessed July 14, 2014
4. Kutscher B. Fewer hospitals have positive margins as they face financial squeeze. Modern Healthcare June 232014;Available at: http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20140621/MAGAZINE/306219968/1135. Accessed July 14, 2014
5. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Pioneer accountable care organizations succeed in improving care, lowering costs. [Press release]. July 162013;Available at: http://www.cms.gov/Newsroom/MediaReleaseDatabase/Press-Releases/2013-Press-Releases-Items/2013-07-16.html. Accessed July 14, 2014
6. American Hospital Association Letter from Linda E Fishman, Senior Vice President, Public Policy Analysis and Development, to Patrick Conway, MD, Acting Director, Innovation Center, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. April 172014;Available at: http://www.aha.org/advocacy-issues/letter/2014/140417-cl-aco.pdf. Accessed July 14, 2014
7. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 2015 letter to issuers in the federally-facilitated marketplaces. March 142014;Available at: http://www.cms.gov/CCIIO/Resources/Regulations-and-Guidance/Downloads/2015-final-issuer-letter-3-14-2014.pdf. Accessed July 14, 2014