The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) published its second-ever report on Unsupported Price Increases (UPI) last week, compiled from data supplied by SSR Health, which is part of the investment research firm SSR. While the medical pricing watchdog found that overall spending was […]
Value-Based Purchasing Rule For Medicaid Rx Drugs
Writing in Health Affairs, outgoing CMS Administrator Seema Verma touts how the Trump Administration helped paved the way for more outcomes-based contracts on prescription drugs by clarifying that these contracts won’t run afoul of the Medicaid “best price” provision -- provided that Medicaid […]
Democrats Have Their Best Shot Yet at Letting Medicare Negotiate Drug Prices
Democrats have their best shot in more than a decade to deliver on one of the party’s central health care promises: allowing Medicare to directly negotiate prescription drug prices. But it’s far from guaranteed that they can deliver. Read more here. (Source: Nicholas Flokko; STAT; 1/21/21) […]
How a Former Health Care Executive Became a Health Care Whistleblower
Former health care executive Wendell Potter spent part of 2020 publishing high-profile apologies for the work he used to do — the lies he said he told the American people for his old employers. These days, he said, he’s also trying to debunk myths he once sold. “What I used to do for a living was […]
(Podcast) Bridge the City: Opportunity Costs of Healthcare in the US
Researchers David Vanness and James Lomas joined the Bridge the City podcast to explain the conclusions of their new paper, "A Health Opportunity Cost Threshold for Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in the United States." They describe how pharmaceutical products whose prices do not represent good value […]
[Podcast] How Doctors Can Be a Part of the Solution
In the final episode of our podcast's inaugural season, neurologist Jason Crowell and ICER's President Steve Pearson discuss what physicians can do in their hospitals and communities to advocate for fair drug prices, and they explore what questions doctors should ask patients to assess for financial […]
State Level Action in Response to ICER’s Unsupported Price Increase Report
In ICER’s latest report on Unsupported Price Increases (UPI), we determined that 7 of the 10 costliest US drug-price hikes in 2019 lacked new evidence of a previously unknown clinical benefit. Even after accounting for rebates, the unsupported price increases on just these 7 drugs cost Americans an […]
New Data Show Retail Medicine Prices Fell in 2019
In 2019, retail prescription medicine prices declined by 0.4%, on average, according to National Health Expenditures (NHE) data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) published recently in Health Affairs. While retail prescription medicine spending grew 5.7% that same year, this […]
Implications of Price Transparency for Providers and Patients as New Rules Go into Effect
A new KFF analysis examines how new federal rules on price transparency for health services may affect patient decision-making and market pricing. As of January 1, 2021, the United States Department of Health and Human Services requires that hospitals publish payer-negotiated rates for common […]
Specialty Generics Face Perverse Incentives In Medicare Part D
Whether specialty generics are cheaper to payers than their originator branded counterparts is partly a function of the level of rebates drugmakers are willing to offer to a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) to secure preferred placement on the formulary. Originator firms can outmaneuver specialty […]
