Missed opportunities
Madelaine Feldman, MD, president of the CSRO and a rheumatologist in private practice with The Rheumatology Group in New Orleans, said in an interview that she welcomes many of the provisions of the new law, as they will help her rheumatology patients afford their medicine.
Dr. Madelaine Feldman
But she considers one of the provisions of the law to be a disappointment. The law further delays the start date for a federal rule intended to allow people on Medicare Part D to directly benefit from discounts negotiated on drugs. This is a point often overlooked in news reports on the law.
Insurers use what are called pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) services to obtain rebates on medicines, but they don’t fully or directly share these price reductions with people enrolled in Part D plans. Instead, people in the Part D plans have their cost sharing pegged closer to listed prices, the ones set before the rebates obtained by PBMs. The PBM industry argues that the rebates, often based on the list price of the drug, serve to keep monthly insurance premiums low. But there’s been concern about perverse incentives in this approach, where more expensive drugs are preferred by PBMs, leading to higher rebates.
Congress had already delayed its implementation of the PBM rule, which would apply savings more directly to patients, until 2027 and did so again in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Implementing this rule on Medicare Part D prescription drug rebates would be a help for patients struggling to pay for costly drugs, such as those used in rheumatology, Dr. Feldman said.
“It just doesn’t make any sense to hold off on these changes if you really want to cut Medicare’s beneficiaries’ cost sharing and attempt to stop the perverse incentive that puts higher priced drugs on Part D formularies,” she said.