Radar on Drug Benefits

Depending on whom you ask, a new “cost-plus pharmacy pricing” option from The Cigna Group’s Express Scripts is either a half-hearted attempt to compete with true market innovation or an offering that simplicity-seeking PBM clients are likely to embrace. However, industry experts agree on one thing: The model was clearly inspired by Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co.

“I’m not surprised to hear that Express Scripts is rolling this out. The Mark Cuban company set the pathway for this to happen; their business is growing pretty quickly,” says Marc Guieb, Pharm.D., a consulting pharmacist at Milliman. He notes that Blue Shield of California in August awarded a contract to Cost Plus Drugs to manage retail pharmacy pricing and payment for the insurer’s members, as part of an “unbundling” of Blue Shield’s current PBM contract with CVS Health Corp.

Zepbound (tirzepatide), Eli Lilly and Co.’s latest glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) agonist product and Lilly's first entrant in that category to be marketed only as a weight loss drug, garnered FDA approval on Nov. 8. The approval intensified already fierce public interest in using GLP-1s for weight loss — which could be bad news for payers, especially commercial plan sponsors, who were already concerned before Zepbound’s approval that the high cost and broad appeal of the drugs will cause premiums to spike.

A recent WTW survey found that 38% of employer-backed health plans cover weight loss drugs, while 22% are considering adding coverage. Mercer found that 42% of large employers cover GLP-1 drugs for weight loss. Brokers and employer plan sponsor trade groups have identified burgeoning GLP-1 utilization as a possible reason for future premium hikes.

Deep within two new proposed health insurance regulations are provisions that would alter how Medicare Advantage and Affordable Care Act exchanges cover prescription drugs — and some of them are garnering praise from patient advocates.

For example, the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute welcomed two of the proposals in the 2025 Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters (NBPP), the annual regulation governing the ACA marketplaces, which CMS released on Nov. 15.

One of those provisions would codify existing policies surrounding how health plans treat prescription drugs that aren’t part of a given state’s essential health benefits (EHB) benchmark plan. Under the ACA, individual market plans must cover items and services in 10 core benefit categories, including prescription drugs, and each state is responsible for defining which drugs make the must-cover list.

Most employer-sponsored plans that have stop-loss insurance coverage should be able to pay for expensive gene therapies that have proven to be cost-effective, according to a recent paper from Health Affairs Scholar. However, a separate Health Affairs analysis published this month argues that payers must assess alternative payment models to afford the medications, which can cost more than $1 million per dose.

Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., one of the authors of the latter Health Affairs paper says that plans have taken varied approaches to paying for gene therapies ranging from “extremely permissive to extremely tight coverage.”

As of 2023, about 50.5 million Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in a plan with Part D prescription drug coverage, with 44% in stand-alone Prescription Drug Plans (PDPs) and 56% in Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug Plans (MA-PDs), according to a KFF analysis.

The three largest Part D insurers by market share — UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health Corp. and Humana Inc. — account for 57% of enrollment in 2023. More than half of UnitedHealth’s and Humana’s Part D enrollees chose MA-PDs, while the majority of CVS Health, Centene Corp. and The Cigna Group Part D enrollees are in PDPs.