By Angela Maas
As more health plans are implementing copay accumulator
programs, manufacturers are struggling to find ways to counter them.
Drugmakers may want to “evaluate [their specialty pharmacy]
network and consider narrowing it to independent SPs that will accept contracts
precluding sharing with payers/PBMs the patients who are participating in your
copay offset program,” recommends a recent survey report from Zitter Insights.
To make sure patients are getting the savings intended, manufacturers could allocate “fewer or no dollars to rebates and more dollars to coupons,” says Elan Rubinstein, Pharm.D., principal at EB Rubinstein Associates. “If the CMS safe harbor proposal is finalized as proposed, and if it becomes effective in January 2020 as proposed, this is in my view an approach that manufacturers will consider.”
However, according to Lisa Kennedy, Ph.D., chief economist at
Epiphany, “it is hard to pull back rebates in a highly competitive area
especially where there are limited formulary places versus where a manufacturer
is in a segment where they have greater capacity for negotiation.”
Some drugmakers are offering patients debit cards to sidestep these programs, as it is more difficult to track these than, say, a coupon that a pharmacy must process, says Melinda Haren, a senior consultant at Zitter Insights. Companies also could offer rebate programs by which the patient pays out-of-pocket for a drug and then is reimbursed.
A few manufacturers are speaking with payers about contracting
to exclude their drugs from these programs. But some legal risk exists with
this approach because “money paid to patients doesn’t count toward the
calculation for best price because it’s going to the patient, not the payer,”
says Haren. In contrast, when manufacturers contract with payers, those details
are “likely reportable under best price,” she says, acknowledging that this is
a “gray area” for drugmakers.
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