One Year After Approval, Closed Formulary Waiver Is in Limbo

  • Jan 27, 2022

    In January 2021, the outgoing Trump administration approved a Medicaid waiver that would have allowed Tennessee to do something novel: implement a “commercial-style” closed drug formulary while still receiving statutory Medicaid rebates for covered drugs. In the year that’s followed, however, it has become clear that the demonstration program faces long odds regarding whether it will ever actually be implemented.

    First, the waiver program — known as TennCare III — is the subject of a lawsuit filed in April 2021 by the National Health Law Program, the Tennessee Justice Center and King & Spalding LLP on behalf of Tennessee Medicaid enrollees. The lawsuit challenges the demonstration program on procedural grounds, arguing that the Trump administration did not provide the required public comment period when it approved Tennessee’s waiver, and on substantive grounds, saying CMS exceeded its authority under Section 1115 of the Medicaid statute in approving the waiver.

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  • Leslie Small

    Leslie has been working in journalism since 2009 and reporting on the health care industry since 2014. She has covered the many ups and downs of the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the failed health insurer mega-mergers, and hundreds of other storylines spanning subjects such as Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage, employer-sponsored insurance, and prescription drug coverage. As the managing editor of Health Plan Weekly and Radar on Drug Benefits, she writes and edits for both publications while overseeing a small team of reporters who also focus on the managed care sector. Before joining AIS Health, she was a senior editor for the e-newsletter Fierce Health Payer, and she started her career as a copy editor at multiple local newspapers. She graduated with a dual degree in journalism and political science from Penn State University.

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