December 20, 2015

Representative Jan Schakowsky Introduces Medicare Fair Drug Pricing Act

This month, the Honorable Jan Schakowsky introduced the Medicare Fair Drug Pricing Act (H.R. 4207), which would give the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) tools to bring down the price of prescription drugs in the Medicare program.

In a statement, Representative Schakowsky said, "Over the past few years, many breakthrough drugs have come to market, providing hope to many Americans living with diseases that currently have little or no treatment or cure. Yet, little has been done to ensure that patients can actually afford those life-saving treatments. That is why, I introduced the Medicare Fair Drug Pricing Act, which would ensure that Medicare beneficiaries have access to breakthrough, life-saving drugs. Under my legislation the Secretary of Health and Human Services would negotiate directly with drug manufacturers of sole source drugs and biologics covered under Medicare Part D to ensure that these medicines are affordable and accessible for beneficiaries."

Endorsed by the Medicare Rights Center, the legislation would require the HHS Secretary to negotiate prices for prescription drugs covered by Medicare Part D that are the only prescription drug of their kind and are not produced by more than two manufacturers. The law would give the Secretary and the drug manufacturer 90 days to negotiate the prescription drug price, and the set price would remain in effect until more than two manufacturers enter the market with competing medicines, as long as one of the prescription drugs is a generic.

Read Representative Schakowsky's announcement.
http://schakowsky.house.gov/press-releases/schakowsky-introduces-medicare-fair-drug-pricing-act

December 17, 2015

Act Blue and the Democratic Party small donor advantage

Small Donors Are Clicking More With Democrats Than Republicans

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/us/politics/small-donors-are-clicking-more-with-democrats-than-republicans.html

In an office here with the trappings of a Silicon Valley tech firm, a band of politically engaged twentysomethings has built a formidable Democratic fund-raising machine that is fueling the insurgent presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders against Hillary Rodham Clinton and leaving even Republican rivals envious.

The success of the Boston-area outfit, a nonprofit called ActBlue, can be seen most starkly in the latest fund-raising report filed by Mr. Sanders, its most prominent political client at the moment. A whopping 74 percent of the $26 million that Mr. Sanders raised came through ActBlue, an online platform that lets people donate a few dollars at a time to Democrats — and Democrats only — with just a few clicks. Eighty-eight percent of contributions to Mr. Sanders came from donations of $200 or less.

“They’ve obviously found a successful formula that works with their base,” Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent Republican campaign lawyer in Washington, said. “We don’t have something like ActBlue. We wish we did.”


Inside the PAC Republicans Fear Most

http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/2015/02/25/inside-pac-republicans-fear-most

Republicans generally scoff at Tom Steyer and other big-money Democrats’ efforts to swing elec­tions against them. When it comes, however, to one group—a group that marshals millions of small-dollar donors against their candidates—they don’t hide their concern.

“The power that Act­Blue has is very real, and that is something that is quickly coming to the realization of not just us but members of Congress,” Tom Newhouse, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s digital director, said at a recent panel. “When we talk to large gatherings of some of our most hotly contested seat, these members get up and say, ‘My opponent raised $800,000 from Act­Blue. What are we doing about this?”

Three-quar­ters of Demo­crat­ic Sen­ate cam­paigns, more than half of Demo­crat­ic House cam­paigns, and both caucuses’ of­fi­cial cam­paign com­mit­tees use Act­Blue, a non­profit vendor, to pro­cess their on­line dona­tions. And the data Act­Blue gen­er­ates in the pro­cess has helped form an ever-grow­ing, di­git­al fun­drais­ing feed­back loop push­ing Demo­crats’ on­line money-gath­er­ing to new heights—and spur­ring Re­pub­lic­an ef­forts to catch up or be swamped.


ActBlue’s One-Click Donations Are Transforming the 2016 Race

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/actblues-one-click-donations-are-changing-the-2016-presidential-race/

There’s a long list of tech giants that are helping drive the presidential race this election season: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, even Yik Yak.

Amazon, on the other hand, is not at the top of the list, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t made difference, at least indirectly. By taking a page from the e-commerce giant’s playbook, a non-profit called ActBlue is driving small donor dollars to Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, with a single click.

The tool, called ActBlue Express, has been around since 2008, but it’s having an outsized impact this election season, now accounting for nearly 70 percent of the millions of donations ActBlue has processed this election season alone.

“Small dollar donors are a strategic advantage for us on the left,” says Erin Hill, ActBlue’s executive director. “Being able to provide tools that we all work on and share together helps increase participation, which we think is better for the Democratic party, makes for stronger campaigns, makes for more lucrative campaigns, but also makes for better democracy.”

It’s true that small donors are, quite literally, giving billionaire-backed Super PACs a run for their money this election season, boosting candidates like Ben Carson on the right and Sanders on the left. Since it was founded in 2004, ActBlue has been working to bring more of these donors into the Democratic fold. In that time, the non-profit, which is backed by donations and gives its software tools to campaigns for free, has processed more than $850 million in donations for 11,000 Democratic candidates and committees.

But ActBlue’s impact has ballooned this year, thanks, in large part, to ActBlue Express. It’s not that it’s the only political donation tool on the market. There are plenty. But more often than not, they’re either dedicated to a single candidate or cost campaigns a lot of money. The key to ActBlue Express’s popularity—and its success—is the fact that aside from the fees credit cards companies charge, it’s free for campaigns and has been used for everything from the presidential elections to local school board races.

December 9, 2015

Insurance companies don't like gold and platinum plans

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: Skimming through the comments of Cigna CEO David Cordani, it comes as no surprise that, with the Anthem/Cigna merger (approved by the shareholders last week), plans are being laid to enhance the business advantages of the corporation to the detriment of the plan participants.

Squeezing enrollment (favoring the healthy), reconfiguring provider networks (impairing access for the sick), reducing spending on Medi/Medi dual-eligibles, selling more patient management programs, and using benefit design to fragment risk pools are the types of policies that we have come to expect from the private insurers. Works well for them.

In this interview, there are a couple of points that demonstrate the problem described in yesterday’s Quote of the Day on information frictions and how they impact adverse selection (concentrating high-risk individuals in a single plan). The more information the purchaser of an insurance plan has, the much greater is the possibility that it will lead to adverse selection.

Cordani says that the market must have a focus on transparency for consumers. With greater transparency, patients with high health care needs will select plans that have the greatest actuarial value - plans that pay the highest percentage of the health care costs. In the exchanges, those are the gold plans. They pay 80 percent of the costs, as opposed to 60 or 70 percent for the bronze and silver plans respectively.

As we learned yesterday, it is essential to have effective risk-adjustment transfers to correct for adverse selection that results from patients understanding the benefits of the plans that they purchase. Well informed, high-risk patients will be concentrated in the gold plans, but since we do not have tools that adjust risk adequately, the insurers will be exposed to the greater risk of adverse selection impacting the gold plans.

So what is Cordani’s solution? Either provide “more flexibility to configure them in a way to make them sustainable,” or eliminate them. Configuring them to make them sustainable is, of course, code language for screwing up the benefits so they it becomes more difficult for patients to access the care that they need. If they can’t screw them up enough, then just get rid of them.

Yesterday’s message on information frictions was a challenging read, but it does show that academics with a heart, such as Benjamin Handel and his colleagues, do have something to offer the policy community. Those who might be interested but passed over yesterday’s message because of its complexity may want to take another stab at reading it. It’s an important concept to understand. It is posted at:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2015/december/information-frictions-good-for-insurers-bad-for-patients

December 5, 2015

Work ‘Till We Die (Social Security video)

http://www.eoionline.org/retirement-security/work-till-we-die-video/

The loudest calls for cutting Social Security come from wealthy CEOs who will never have to worry about their own retirement security.

The roughly 200 CEOs who collectively make up Business Roundtable — a business lobbying group that often pushes conservative views, including Social Security cuts — have average retirement savings of $14.5 million, according to the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government.

That’s about 1,200 times more than what the median American worker has saved for retirement a decade before the end of his or her career, according to the study. (That paltry amount is just $12,000, by the way, according to a separate report.)

But by simply requiring upper-income taxpayers to pay the same tax rate as middle-class families, Social Security’s benefits could be expanded — AND its funding would remain in balance for decades beyond the longest projections.

December 4, 2015

Wyden-Grassley Sovaldi Investigation Finds Revenue-Driven Pricing Strategy Behind $84,000 Hepatitis

-- Drug

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: Gilead’s heartless strategy in deciding to price their hepatitis C drugs well above what any reasonable market would tolerate demonstrates yet another detrimental consequence of our health care financing model, perpetuated and expanded by the Affordable Care Act. Gilead assumed that they could get away with it since they figured that most of the costs would be covered by the drug plans in the various public and private insurance programs. Well, they pushed too hard.

The extensive investigation by the staffs of the Senator Ron Wyden and Senator Charles Grassley confirmed that the pricing of Sovaldi and Harvoni was based on pure greed, ignoring completely the human consequences.

The other report released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation demonstrates the consequences that these egregious pricing behaviors have on Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in the Part D drug program - a program supposedly designed to improve value by leveraging market forces. Even when the preferred drug - Harvoni - is included in the Part D formulary, the median out-of-pocket cost for the Medicare beneficiary is $7,153! There goes the food and the rent and a whole lot more.

The Kaiser Foundation report is particularly helpful in demonstrating how deficient the Medicare Part D program is. They suggest shopping, but who knows what outrageously priced drugs will be prescribed next year? How can you shop drug formularies for drugs you have not yet been prescribed?

Single payer advocates understand that none of this would be tolerated in a well designed national health program. You would simply receive the drugs you need, when you needed them. Gilead would be compensated fairly for their products. It’s just too bad that their current executives will not end up in jail, where they belong.

December 2, 2015

Dismayed by drug prices, public supports Democrats’ ideas

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: There is an important lesson here for single payer advocates. The public now wants the government to do something about the large increases in drug prices. It is not because of personal experience with these high prices but rather it is due to the OUTRAGE over the injustice of patients in need unnecessarily facing egregiously high drug pricing.

Much worse than the drug pricing crisis is the financial hardship, outrageous physical suffering and even loss of life that is due to our highly dysfunctional method of financing health care, even though we are spending about twice as much per capita as the average of other wealthy nations

Our nation needs to understand that merely switching to a single payer system would correct the injustices of the financing system that the Affordable Care Act failed to rectify. With a well designed single payer system we would not only get the pricing of pharmaceuticals right, we would price correctly the rest of the system as well while improving access and free choice of health care - all without spending any more than we do already, yet spending it more equitably so as to eliminate for everyone the prospect of financial hardship due to health care.

If it takes outrage to create a demand for government action, then let’s work on our framing so that people understand that they should be outraged by the profound but remediable injustices that characterize our health care financing system. Start with intensified efforts to educate the media, since it has been the media that aroused the nation on outrageous drug pricing.

December 1, 2015

Instability in Marketplaces Draws Concern on Both Sides of Health Law

Comment by Don McCanne of PNHP: Instability. Shrinking networks. Soaring deductibles. These are characteristics of plans offered in the Obamacare insurance exchanges - features that are now contaminating employer-sponsored health benefit programs. What can be done?

We can stabilize choice in physicians and hospitals by eliminating the networks, providing patients with free choice of their health care professionals and institutions. We can eliminate instability in access caused by financial barriers to care by eliminating deductibles, copays and coinsurance. We can stabilize insurance coverage by mandating it while making premiums truly affordable for everyone.

The problem is that under the current model of financing care, the insurers cannot offer plans with affordable premiums without reducing patient access to care - precisely what networks and deductibles are designed to do.

As it turns out, even with these perverse measures most insurers are still losing money. Mounting losses only perpetuate and intensify instability since the insurers must make additional changes to ensure the success of their business model. Quite clearly, additional changes based on business decisions will benefit only the insurers while serving to the further detriment of patients.

Suppose we did reverse course and eliminated networks, excessive cost sharing, tiering of benefits, and other detrimental features of today’s health plans. The variable that would have to give is affordability of the insurance premiums. They would skyrocket. If we really want people to have affordable access to decent health care by correcting these problems, that means that the government subsidies would have to be greatly expanded - both in the amount and in the size of the population that would be eligible. Basically, the government would be covering much of our care, except for the wealthy.

If we were to spend that much in taxes to support such a system, why would we perpetuate this very wasteful and dysfunctional model that we have? If we had any sense, we would demand an efficient, effective system that would ensure access for everyone - a single payer national health program (an improved Medicare for all). Until we do, learn to enjoy the torment of increasing instability in our health care.