The growing popularity of Medicare Part D (the Medicare Drug program) among health plans pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), is a mystery. As I have noted before, the program as presently conceived is guaranteed to drive adverse selection with only the seniors who will get more from the program than they will pay in likely to subscribe.
I asked national health policy expert Bob Laszewski of Health Policy and Strategy Associates (not affiliated with my firm) if I’m missing something, if there is a good reason why PBMs and health plans are jumping into this business. Bob pointed to a Brandeis University study that indicated those seniors who purchased the drug discount card tended to he high users of drugs. No surprise there – what is revealing is the underlying statistics. Drug card purchasers saved 20% (on average) but used the card twice as often as seniors who received a card automatically from their health plan.
Defenders of the Part D program cite PBMs’ expertise in formulary management, bulk pricing arrangements, cost-sharing with seniors (co-pays etc.) as evidence of their ability to control costs.
Perhaps most telling is the Federal government’s announcement that they will protect PBMs and health plans from excessive losses incurred as a result of their Part D drug programs.
The net – this is one of those “if everyone else is doing it, we better too” businesses. It is reminiscent of the pricing cycles in property and casualty insurance, where as soon as carriers start losing money they raise prices, and as soon as they start making money they cut prices to capture volume. This pattern has been as consistent as the tides, and likely as inevitable.
What does this mean for you?
For those of us on the sidelines, observing the outcome of the rush into Medicare Part D drug cards will be instructive. It is possible that I am missing something here, that PBM programs actually can address utilization (although I have never seen evidence that they do, and because they traditionally make money only when prescriptions are filled, utilization management is not in their DNA).
But I doubt it.

Back to the detailers v. doctors, if only just for a moment. Dr. Gary Schwitzer of the U. of Minnesota has posted an interesting piece on Rep Henry Waxman’s indictment (figurative, not literal) of Merck’s behavior related to misleading MDs about Vioxx.
Another blog has a highly entertaining review of some highly embarassing marketing training literature ostensibly used by Merck. Suffice it to say that they are using anatomy as well as physiology in their efforts to “reach” docs…
What does this mean to you?
The dollars pharmas have to spend on convincing MDs to order their drugs are much larger than the dollars managed care firms have to “counter-detail”. If managed care firms, insurers, and employers want to stand any chance in this battle, they need to figure out how to do a much better job of educating docs than they have to date.

The latest casualty among drugs falling victim to over-promotion and under-testing is Bextra, Pfizer’s COX-2 inhibitor. This time around it is not just cardiovascular issues that are the problem.
Bextra appears to be linked to a significantly higher incidence of a serious skin reaction, a problem not found in the other COX-2s. This skin condition is what led the FDA to “request” that Pfizer pull the drug last week. Earlier, Pfizer was asked to add additional safety warnings to Bextra’s labeling, a move that fell short of a withdrawal request.
Reactions ran the gamut from shock and disbelief to “I told you so”; perhaps the most telling appeared in the New York Times:
Thalia Segal, a pain specialist at New York University, said, “We used to just put people on these drugs for life and not think about it, but we can no longer commit them to lifelong therapy with impunity. We have to use these medications judiciously and follow people more closely. We have to rely on a much more individualized approach” (O’Connor, New York Times, 4/8).
It is becoming painfully (no pun intended) obvious that the “side effects” of various medications can not only be quite serious, to the point where people die or suffer debilitating conditions, but also have been under-considered by administrators and big pharma alike. And, the treatment expense and other liability associated with these side effects will contribute to our rising health care costs. Over the short term, financial results of the pharmas will suffer (“Pfizer, which on Wednesday announced plans to reduce costs by $4 billion annually and restated 2005 earnings estimates, might have to make additional cost reductions to return to double-digit earnings growth by 2006

I’ve been in Arizona at the Pharmacy Benefit Management Institute annual conference for the last couple of days, and will be reporting back in more detail later. Here are a few of the interesting take-aways

Merck announced last week that almost 1400 lawsuits have been filed related to Vioxx to date. Many of these have been consolidated in US District Court in New Orleans, including over a hundred that are class-action suits.
Over 20 million Americans have taken Vioxx, and Merck expects the volume of lawsuits to increase substantially.
In comparison, Wyeth Labs’ “Fen-phen” diet drug has resulted in over 60,000 lawsuits as the company has reserved over $21 billion to cover the litigation.
Source Insurance Journal

Two Republican Senators have introduced legislation that will cap annual Medicare drug expenditures. Here’s the article from “California HealthLine” –
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Thursday introduced legislation that would cap spending on the Medicare prescription drug benefit to the original Congressional Budget Office estimate of $395 billion over 10 years, CongressDaily reports. The new CBO estimate for the benefit is $849 billion between 2006 and 2015.
The bill would establish annual spending caps for the benefit, and the president would be required to submit legislation to scale back the benefit if spending goes beyond that amount. Graham said, “I was always concerned the projected costs of the Medicare prescription drug benefit would turn out to be wrong. Even I was surprised at how quickly and dramatically the projected costs of the program spiked” (CongressDaily, 3/11).
This is rather significant, to say the least. There are clearly cracks in the Republican wall, cracks that appear to be generated by deep concern over the cost of this huge entitlement.
As one wag put it when talking about the Medicare drug bill, “I didn’t realize conservatives could be THAT compassionate!”