Here at the Medicaid and the Law Blog, we’ve spent the past couple of days going through the American Rescue Plan Act, legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last Friday that is the latest attempt by Congress to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are several provisions of the legislation that would revise and expand the Medicaid program, and we thought it would be of interest to highlight them here. … More
As my colleague Tom wrote about in a recent post, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has finally responded to a growing chorus of stakeholders that government price reporting requirements, particularly Medicaid Best Price (BP), are stifling innovative value-based contracting arrangements (VBAs). As the proverbial wisdom goes, “nothing changes if nothing changes,” and CMS’ recently finalized proposal to allow manufacturers to report multiple BPs is meant to stimulate innovative changes in contracting for drugs and biologicals.… More
If you have not already read it, you can read our main summary of the Tennessee waiver approval HERE.
Now that we have had the chance to read and meditate on the historic Medicaid waiver approved on Friday January 8th, giving Tennessee permission from the Federal government to fundamentally alter Medicaid’s traditional “matching” financing structure for the 1.5 million Tennesseans who rely on the program for healthcare services,… More
Earlier this year, my colleague Ross Margulies and I told you about a new proposed rule issued by CMS that makes several changes to the Medicaid prescription drug rebate program, or the MDRP. Recently, CMS finalized the rule and we thought we’d take this opportunity to tell you about it. On balance, we think that the rule succeeds in CMS’s stated goals of increasing access to innovative health care therapies to Medicaid beneficiaries as well as clarifying some longstanding questions about the operation of the MDRP.… More
My colleague Ross Margulies has already told our readers about a provision of the new proposed Medicaid regulation governing how the program pays for outpatient prescription drugs under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, or MDRP. Today, we turn our attention to another provision of that proposed rule, and that is CMS’s attempts to permit pharmaceutical manufacturers, states, and commercial payers to enter into value based payment arrangements for covered outpatient drugs. … More
As many of our astute readers are aware, on June 17, 2020 CMS released a long-awaited Medicaid proposed rule addressing a number of far-ranging issued involving Medicaid coverage and payment for prescription drugs, including new regulations to encourage the development value-based purchasing arrangements between states and manufacturers. Over the next several days we will be posting our thoughts on a number of these key policy proposals, including CMS’… More
Earlier this year, we wrote about a lawsuit involving the 340B drug pricing program. We sometimes write about the 340B program because it is integrally linked to the Medicaid prescription drug rebate program. So today, we wanted to call attention to a proposed regulation issued by the Massachusetts Medicaid program (which is called “MassHealth”) that shows that link clearly.
Section 1927 of the Social Security Act requires pharmaceutical manufacturers to provide a rebate to state Medicaid plans if they want to have their drugs covered by Medicaid. … More
It was just earlier this week that we were writing about a flurry of solicitations released by the the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) seeking bids from manufacturers of select, generally high-priced outpatient drugs for supplemental rebates in MassHealth’s fee-for-service and managed care programs. At that time, we noted that this exercise was likely foreshadowing the release of Governor Baker’s budget proposal.… More
Despite Mylan’ $465 million settlement with the Department of Justice for overcharging Medicaid millions of dollars for its product EpiPen, Congress is not ready to let bygones be bygones. In a display of bipartisanship, Sen. Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Wyden (D-OR) unveiled a bill (section-by-section summary) entitled “The Right Rebate Act” (RRA) on December 4, 2018 and explicitly cited the EpiPen experience as the chief motivating factor for its creation. … More
In a wide-ranging speech on CMS’s efforts to lower Medicaid drug costs, Administrator Seema Verma announced yesterday that CMS has approved Michigan’s proposed state plan amendment to utilize value-based payment arrangements with drug manufacturers. With CMS’s blessing, Michigan can now enter contracts with pharmaceutical companies in which manufacturers provide the state supplemental rebates when their drugs fail to meet specified treatment benchmarks.
Michigan is the second state that has received CMS’s approval to pursue value-based purchasing agreements.… More