Tag: health care costs

What Can Be Done About Skyrocketing Drug Prices?

The American government and even major insurers actually have a lot of levers they can pull to lower drug costs – but do politicians, insurers, and employers have the courage to try?

The drumbeat of overpriced-drug stories has been continuous in America of late, from Martin Shkreli’s 5400% price hike last year, to the recent price hike and subsequent backpedaling of Mylan with respect to the EpiPen. With growing outrage over skyrocketing drug prices, it’s worth asking – what can be done about it? Drug pricing is not subject to typical market forces since a new drug often has exactly 0 direct competitors – enabling a drug company to set virtually any price. New cancer drugs often start list pricing at $300,000 per year, while groundbreaking new Hepatitis-C treatments like Gilead’s Sovaldi started out at $84,000 for a short term (curative) course of treatment. Insurance companies (and major employers) have been unwilling to say no, swallowing each hike and passing it on in higher premiums. Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and other public entities have been banned from negotiating prices, leaving them powerless to get a better deal for those receiving care through their programs. Here are a few ideas on how to break the logjam, in order of increasing potential savings:

1. The Anti-Monopoly Approach

Making drugs, and in particular so-called small molecule drugs, is actually both inexpensive and easy. The primary protection that drug makers use to enforce their monopoly position on new drugs is the patent system. While this arguably makes sense for new drugs, what about long-generic drugs? In recent years certain drug companies (e.g. Valeant) began specializing in buying up the manufacturers of old drugs and immediately hiking prices. After gaining a monopoly position it became easy to hike prices by 50-100% per year and extract huge profits, while new entrants were stymied by
the FDA approval process required to certify the efficacy of their drug version. Why not streamline the FDA approval rules for generic drug manufacture? If a drug is tested and shown to be chemically identical, how much further testing is really necessary?

Alternately, the Department of Justice or FTC could bring suit to halt acquisitions which would leave zero competitors in the market for a generic drug. Special pharmacies called compounding pharmacies are also capable of making many drug compounds. Why not
allow compounding pharmacies to compete across all generic drugs, or specifically contract with them to make generic equivalents for the VA system or Medicaid system?

2. The “Title IX” Approach

Private American colleges and universities are not actually required by law to provide equity in women’s sports, or to follow any of a wide range of Department of Education edicts. The catch? In order to receive federal funding, institutions of higher education must comply with these rules. Since virtually all colleges make use of varying forms of federal assistance, they fall into line.

The American pharmaceutical industry does very little original research – most innovations originate in the university system, and most of the research funding (over $21B per year) comes from the National Institutes of Health [1]. The American government could utilize this lever to strongly influence drug pricing. Pharmaceutical companies might be required to adhere to certain pricing guidelines if they wished to license research originating from NIH funding.

Those guidelines might require drug makers to release drugs into the generic market on an accelerated timeline, for instance. Or the rules might require that drug makers adhere to a value-based pricing approach, as described further below. Drug makers could be required to pay a tiered tax on drug sales to fund NIH research – a tax of 25% on prices above $1000/patient/month and 50% above $4000/patient/month could simultaneously fund future research and encourage drug makers to keep pricing down. The advantage of the “Title IX” approach is that it preserves the liberty of drug companies – if they don’t want to conform with the rules, they can simply do their own basic research. Fiscal conservatives might find this approach palatable as it directly charges users (drug companies) for the government programs they use, and lowers the deficit in the process.

3. The Value-Based Approach

If insurers and government buyers (Medicare/Medicaid/VA) all insisted on paying for value, pharmaceutical companies might be compelled to go along. How do you define value? The UK’s NICE measures the efficacy of medical treatments by attempting to measure the number of “quality-adjusted life years” provided by that treatment. If a cancer drug postpones death by 2 years on average, and has mild side effects, then it can be said to provide 2 years of QALY. The NIH takes this a step further by quantifying how much it will pay per QALY (currently around 25,000 pounds per year), and it sets prices
on drugs using this approach.

American buyers could emulate this approach by offering to pay for measured improvements in outcomes. If a new cancer drug extends life by 2 years, but existing cancer drugs extend life by 1.5 years, then the value of the new drug is an additional half-year of life. Drug buyers could offer to pay a premium for the new drug based on this degree of improvement, and no more. Buyers could also use this as a way to foster competition between older and newer generations of drugs. The older drug is 75% as effective, so it can be placed into competition with the new drug, but at a discount. Express Scripts took this approach in the Hepatitis-C market and was among the first buyers to find a way to push back against Gilead’s $1000 per-pill asking price for Sovaldi.

Conclusion

As long insurers are happy to pass rising costs along in the form of higher premiums, and American politicians remain beholden to the pharmaceutical lobby, nothing will change. But the ideas outlined above show that America doesn’t need European style price controls to break the drug price spiral – a combination of relatively small policy changes and insurers’ willingness to negotiate are all that is required.

 

[1] This article investigates the breakdown of basic pharmaceutical research in detail, and concludes that big pharma companies contribute less than 25% of research dollars in the US, with most of the balance coming from the NIH.

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The Mystery of Health Care Pricing

Many economists, think tanks, and politicians have been agitating for more consumer-driven health care in the US. They argue that if consumers have to spend their own money for care, they will tend not to waste health care resources, and they will shop around for cost-effective care. The first part of this argument appears valid, as individuals will always spend their own money most carefully. Studies have validated this hypothesis, showing that individuals with high-deductible insurance and health savings accounts (HSAs) tend to spend less than those on traditional insurance.

But are individuals able to shop for health care in a competitive marketplace? Personal experience and numerous reports indicate otherwise. In the US, most health care providers can’t tell you the price of any particular health care service until after it’s been performed! I recently shopped around for a health care service, and called four doctors’ offices in total. One office told me that they “aren’t allowed to provide that sort of information.” Two more offices were flabbergasted, and attempted to ease their way out of the conversation. Only one office was able to answer with an actual price quote.

Why is this so difficult for medical providers? Virtually all chargeable medical services have associated CPT Codes, which are defined by the American Medical Association [1]. Hospitals, labs, and most medical practices have a chargemaster, which is essentially a price list. Even small practices without explicit chargemasters know the rate their doctor charges for his time. When insurers and medical providers negotiate payment structures, they negotiate using the chargemaster rates (and usually Medicare rates) as starting points for negotiation.

The currently proposed health care reform plans have missed this essential element: require all health care providers to publish standardized price lists, and market competition can begin [2]. For doctors, a simple hourly rate should be enough to satisfy this requirement. Hospitals and labs should be required to initially publish online price lists for their most common charges, with the list expanding over time. While this information is irrelevant to patients in emergency situations, the great majority of health care spending is pre-planned [3].

Put another way, why not include a mandate on medical price lists as part reform? The cost of the mandate to providers is extremely low, as the information is available, and publishing the information online eliminates distribution costs. While price transparency is making slow progress, Congress has an opportunity to make this happen, and should do so as part of the health care reform package.

[1] The AMA would likely be a primary opponent of free publishing of CPT code-based price lists, since it derives signicant ($70M per year) income from its copyright on CPT codes. If the government is to open up the pricing market, it may have to break this monopoly by buying the copyright at fair value and putting it in the public domain.

[2] Consider a scenario in which all doctors are required to provide price lists. Since most small practices would find this difficult, they might just quote a maximum hourly charge. One surgeon might quote $1000 per hour, and another $2000 per hour. And there you have it, competition on price can begin, just as it occurs for plastic surgery, Lasik, and other out-of-pocket services today!

[3] According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 70% of health care expenditures are non-hospital expenses. Since many hospital expenses are planned, it appears that significantly less than 30% of health care expenses are emergencies in which consumers have no choice of provider. According to ACEP, only 3% of health care costs are emergency-related.

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How Much Would Universal Healthcare Cost?

Universal health care would cost $70 Billion for 2009 if enacted using a market-based approach, but this cost will grow rapidly if overall health care inflation is not tamed.

How much would health coverage for all uninsured Americans really cost? Critics maintain that covering all Americans would break the US budget (which is already overstretched), while advocates maintain that covering all Americans can be done affordably. But how much would universal coverage really cost?

The Commonwealth Fund provides a great summary of the costs of proposals under consideration, including Medicare for all, a Building Blocks extension of the current system, and other proposals. Proponents of universal Medicare claim that it will save the US $58 Billion in 2010, since Medicare operates more efficiently than private insurers [1]. Providing universal coverage through incremental changes could cost anywhere between $48B and $120B, according to analyses by the Urban Institute and the Lewin Group, a private health care consultancy. And while Medicare for all would lower total health care spending, it would raise the Federal government’s share of spending by almost $200 Billion per year.

With numbers all over the map, is it possible to come up with a plausible estimate for comparison purposes? Sites like ehealthinsurance.com now make it much easier to get estimates for insurance coverage. Using this data, we can estimate how much basic health insurance coverage would cost for the 45 million uninsured Americans. The experience of Massachusetts, which has implemented universal health care, can also be used to project an estimate for the rest of the country. Since Massachusetts’ health care costs are above US average, this provides a high-side estimate.

Using market insurance quotes, the cost of providing a health insurance with a $1000 deductible and prescription coverage would amount to $2500 per person annually, or roughly $115B per year [2]. This calculation uses different insurance rates for different age groups among the uninsured, based on this demographic breakdown of the uninsured provided by the Kaiser Foundation. In Massachusetts’ experience, covering each uninsured individual costs roughly $3400 per year. Covering all 45 million uninsured Americans at this rate would cost $150 Billion per year.

The midpoint of these estimates is around $130 Billion per year. To get a final estimate, money currently spent on uncompensated care must be subtracted out, since there is no uncompensated care in a universal health care system. Approximately $58 Billion will be spent on uncompensated care in 2009 [3], and subtracting this figure out leaves roughly $70 Billion in annual expenditure required for universal health care.

While $70 Billion per year sounds like a lot of money, it’s actually less than many estimates. It looks increasingly likely that some kind of health care reform will be passed in 2009, and that money will be found to pay for it for the moment. The bigger question is, how will it be paid for tomorrow? Unless health care cost growth is pulled into line with inflation, no one has that answer.

[1] Medicare doesn’t have to perform medical underwriting, and it doesn’t have to spend money on advertising, sales, or shareholder dividends, so its overhead should be lower than private competitors, if it can maintain efficiency. Critics counter that Medicare suffers from high fraud rates precisely because it is a government bureaucracy without competition to force it to raise efficiency and tighten controls.

[2] Here is the rough cost estimate for each demographic group, taken from quotes on ehealthinsurance.com:

0-19: $100/month  (20% of all uninsured)

20-29: $150/month (29% of all uninsured)

30-44: $200/month (27% of all uninsured)

45-64: $400/month (24% of all uninsured)

Using these numbers, we calculate a weighted average cost per person of $213 per month, or $2556 per year. That’s $115 Billion for 45 million people.

[3] In 2004, uncompensated care expense was estimated at $40.7 Billion. Since health care spending (in nominal dollars) has grown at 7.5% per year during this decade, the adjusted number for 2009 is approximately $58 Billion. This assumes that uncompensated care is growing in line with health care costs as a whole.

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US Healthcare – Where does all the money go?

The Census Bureau recently released the results of its 2006 Services Industry Survey, which shed light in particular on where US healthcare dollars are spent:

Census Bureau Press Release: “Doctors and Dentists Account for 27 Percent of $1.6 Trillion in Health Care Revenue”

Full tabular data on US healthcare spending in 2006

The second link provides some detail on where US health care spending goes. It’s worthwhile to note that $117 Billion in Social Assistance is included, with line items like children’s daycare, community housing assistance, and other rolled into the overall Health Care and Social Assistance category. Without Social Assistance, health care spending is actually 1.45 trillion, or 11% of US GDP.
Read the full entry (500 words) …

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