Jun 25, 2018
Though the spotlight
recently has been trained on President Trump’s blueprint to rein in drug
prices, there’s already been a plethora of state-level legislation concerning
drug prices and reimbursement.
Earlier this month, a
three-judge panel in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously struck
down a law enacted in Arkansas back in 2015 that requires PBMs to reimburse
pharmacies for generic drugs at or above the cost the pharmacy paid to acquire
the drug. Meanwhile, in April, a different three-judge panel struck down a
Maryland law that prohibits price gouging for “essential drugs.”
Gerard Anderson, a
health policy professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
says that such laws often don’t stand up to legal scrutiny. “This happens all
the time when you’re first passing the law at the state level — you don’t quite
get it right,” he says. “And so you learn from your mistakes, and you make
modifications.”
That said, it can be
difficult for states to target drug costs through legislation and should be
done at the national level, according to Anderson.
Another type of law
that’s faced legal pushback concerns drug-price transparency.
One of the most
visible was a California law enacted last October, which requires drug
manufacturers to give public and private purchasers 90 days’ advance
notification — and justification — when they raise the price of certain drugs,
according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).
Another noteworthy
transparency law comes from Nevada, which forces drugmakers to report the costs
of marketing and manufacturing all essential anti-diabetes medications and
requires them to justify price hikes for such drugs that exceed a set amount.
On the PBM regulation
side, Colleen Becker at the NCSL says it’s possible that additional states will
aim to assign fiduciary duty to PBMs. Yet it remains unclear whether any of
these measures will have a tangible impact on drug prices and costs.
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