Grab Bag Today: 2024 Price Hikes, 340B, Orange Book, Smoothing ...

It’s the Friday before a long weekend, so it’s all Quick Turns into the weekend. See you Tuesday.

• CNN has a new piece on 2024 price hikes. I give them credit for working with 46Brooklyn and quoting Antonio Ciaccia. But it’s a 1,300-word story about drug prices that doesn’t mention PBMs. That should give you a hint as to whether it’s worth clicking the link. 

• I’m not sure that anything about this Axios story about how states are looking real hard at their obesity-drug spend is new, but it does pull everything together with a neat little bow. The most interesting piece to me, actually, is the graph at the top of the article, which is a reheated version of six-month-old numbers pulled together from KFF, which -- in turn -- is based on figures from 2022. (All of which is pulled from this raw data source, and all of which doesn’t account for rebates.) That’s not a policy comment, just media criticism. 

• Speaking of pieces that don’t break ground but tie things together neatly, this KFF Health News article on the out-of-pocket cap (and a review of the IRA’s impact on patients more generally) is pretty good. But it’s also a reminder that David Mitchell/Patients for Affordable Drugs has a stranglehold on how patient experiences are shared with the media.  

• I have no idea if the lawsuit accusing drugmakers of underpaying a 340B hospital is legit, but I’d be remiss in not passing along the kicker to the STAT piece on the suit. The quote in question is (again) from Antonio Ciaccia: “[C]onsidering the massive expansion of the 340B program and the subsequent growth of the spreads harvested by covered entities from that expansion, the claims of financial harm and ruin from hospitals would appear to be more theatrical in nature than grounded in reality.”

• I know that I passed along the link to the final brief filed by HHS in the Chamber IRA suit yesterday, but I missed that it has a callout to the decision in the PhRMA case on page 10 (Bloomberg Law alerted me.) My assumption is that this is just a little twist of the knife on HHS’ part -- I don’t think that the government is making analogous arguments in the two cases -- but the victory lap is worth noting.

• The latest in the effort to strip Orange Book patents is a letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal to the FDA asking the agency to crack down on Orange Book listings. USA Today has the scoop. Not a lot of context in that story … or any reaction from industry. I’m curious if all of this hand-waving is having any effect (or what the effect is supposed to be). Otherwise, it feels like the equivalent of trying to make fetch happen. 

• No one really covered the latest in HHS’ effort to implement the smoothing provision of the IRA (officially: "Medicare Prescription Payment Plan”), which allows for medication costs to be spread out through the year, rather than bunched up at the beginning as deductibles are satisfied. HHS dropped new guidance that appears to focus on how plans should be promoting the idea, and I’m really curious to see whether this is a concept that will ever be simplified enough to see widespread adoption.