Radar on Drug Benefits

With COVID-19 infections surging once again, the Biden administration has stepped up efforts to increase the supply of Paxlovid, the Pfizer Inc. antiviral that garnered emergency use authorization as a therapeutic treatment for the coronavirus. However, increased availability for Paxlovid might end in coming months — Congress has stalled on providing the increased COVID-19 response funding that the administration requested, and experts say health plans are likely to treat the drug like any other if the federal government isn’t picking up the tab for treatments.

The Biden administration has pushed in recent weeks to increase the availability of Paxlovid, free of charge, to COVID-19 patients. On May 26, the White House released a statement touting the rollout of more than 2,500 “test-to-treat” sites where free testing and Paxlovid courses are available, along with 40,000 locations where antivirals are available for patients. The administration also noted that it had “increased the number of people benefiting from oral antivirals in the last seven weeks, from about 27,000 prescriptions filled each week to more than 182,000 last week.”

Researchers from the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics are pushing for more transparency in the pharmaceutical supply chain and policy changes in the generic drug sector. Their recommendations, published in a white paper on May 31, were based on their findings that PBMs and health insurers cost patients, employers and the federal government billions of dollars per year in the generic drug market.

Karen Van Nuys, Ph.D., one of the paper’s authors and executive director of the Center’s Value of Life Sciences Innovation Project, tells AIS Health, a division of MMIT, that she recommends changes in the way pharmacies set their cash prices as well as in some formularies that favor branded drugs over generics and so-called spread pricing, where PBMs reimburse pharmacies one price, charge health plans a higher price and pocket the difference.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said on Tuesday that it will investigate the business practices and consolidation of PBMs, following months of pressure from health care stakeholders. The FTC’s investigation, which is just the latest escalation in a nationwide regulatory push to clamp down on PBMs’ most controversial methods, was praised by plan sponsors and pharmaceutical groups.

The FTC’s leadership, a panel of five commissioners, voted unanimously to launch the investigation under section 6(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. The commissioners are a mix of two Democrats and two Republicans, with the fifth seat filled by the party that holds the White House. The unanimous vote is a reversal for the two Republican panelists appointed by former President Donald Trump. The Republican commissioners voted against a similar inquiry in February, deadlocking with the two Democratic commissioners — the swing seat on the panel was unfilled at the time. That fifth commissioner, Democrat Alvaro Martin Bedoya, was confirmed by the Senate in May on a party-line vote.

Now that many large employers have finalized employee health benefits for 2023, some clear trends are emerging, pharmacy benefit consultants tell AIS Health. Among them: many plan sponsors have traditional drug benefits on auto-pilot but are hyper-focused on high-cost specialty drugs.

For non-specialty drugs, the cost trend is pretty flat, says Paul Burns, a pharmacy practice leader at the HR consulting firm Buck. “There’s been some increases over the pandemic, but it’s not wildly spiking — and that’s where 98% of the utilization is.”