Today’s Managing Health Care Costs Number is 7000
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the PhRMA, the trade group of the pharmaceutical industry is unleashing an ad campaign to improve its reputation and halt efforts to impose government price regulations.
Many of the ads are running on social-media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter,because PhRMA wants to target federal and state lawmakers, policy analysts and other political “influencers,” said Robert Zirkelbach, senior vice president of communications at PhRMA,
This is in part a response to a letter sent by Senator Al Franken and seven colleagues urging Barack Obama to include vigorous efforts to combat high drug prices in his 2017 budget. Ironically, the Republican Senate and House leaders have pledged to utterly ignore Obama’s budget proposal.
The budget for the PhRMA effort is not reported, but I’m pretty surprised at how low the reported pharmaceutical lobbying expense was in 2015.
Here’s another surprise. The current effort is targeting just 7000 policymakers! Those policymakers might feel like Iowans or New Hampshire residents in February of Presidential election years. They might have so many policy ads that they won’t see any ads for medicines to improve erections, increase sleep, or address opoid related constipation!
For the record, the President did not mention drug prices in his budget message. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) budget said:
The effect of rising prices for drugs on beneficiary costs and access to medications is one of the most urgent issues for patients and their families in today’s health care system. Drug spending increased by 12.2 percent in 2014, making it one of the fastest growing portions of healthcare cost. The FY 2017 President’s Budget includes a number of proposals aimed at improving access to necessary treatments and increasing the value that Americans get from their medications, while continuing to encourage important and lifesaving innovations.
Here are the proposals, which the President’s budget says would save over $170 billion over 10 years: (see page 65 of this document)
- Increase data collection on drug effectiveness
- Allow the Secretary of HHS to negotiate drug process for biologic and high cost drugs for Medicare Part D recipients
- Accelerate discounts for seniors in the Medicare “donut hole” where they pay all costs out of pocket
- Require drug manufacturers to give Medicaid rebates to low income Part D recipients
- Increases Medicaid rebate rate
- Require drug manufacturers to report on manufacturing, research and development costs
- Decrease biologic agent exclusivity from 12 years to 7 years, and make it more difficult to gain extensions
