It's Time for Mid-Year Price-Hike Silliness

I’ll be honest: today’s news is mostly about keeping a leash on other, non-biopharma parts of the health care ecosystem. If you all were waiting for the day when hospitals and PBMs would get their time in the sun, well, I have good news.

Also: I had a fantastic conversation with TheracoBio’s CEO, Al Collinson, yesterday. He’s the leader of the company that is trying to make a go of the radically-low-cash-pay business model, working with Mark Cuban to do so. I’ll make sure there are some highlights here tomorrow, and I’m shooting to post a more extensive Q-and-A on LinkedIn this weekend.

I’ve had kind of a July (the highlight: my 12-year-old greyhound broke both his front legs), so I pretty much missed that it was time for midyear drug-price increases.

Fortunately, AHIP has me covered. They pushed out some paper yesterday decrying the number of price hikes being taken, sourcing back to an AnalySource release from earlier in the week. (The Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing, too, has a release on the AnalySource numbers.)

I have been on the record A LOT saying that price-increase stories usually make the general populace dumber by failing to provide important context about list-vs-net prices and generally conflating different kinds of medicines. A 9.9% increase on a blockbuster pill that took a 9.9% hike last year is not the same as a small-dollar hospital product that took a 20% increase after a decade of flat pricing.

The AHIP/CSRxP/AnalySource framing would just play into that. There was a lot of alarm raised in all the releases about drugs that didn’t even take mid-year price increases (but highlighting in bold the names of medicines you might have heard of is an effective scare tactic).

So it’s probably good that no one in the press seems to be biting on the mid-year price-increase narrative.

That said, this isn’t entirely a non-story. I went and pulled the numbers and -- sure enough -- there are a small number of outlier blockbuster products that look like they’re taking annualized price increases outside of the norm. Which ones raised my eyebrows? I ain’t telling.

• It’s a Mission: Impossible summer, so the line “should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your action” is in my head, especially with the news that the FTC is voting today to disavow any knowledge of their prior pro-PBM stance. Bloomberg Law has the details. (The FTC used to be in the business of protecting PBMs from regulatory action. These days: not so much.)

• The new FTC/DOJ guidelines for blocking mergers is probably bad news for hospital consolidation and private equity investment in providers. Not sure anyone other than hospital execs and PE types will be shedding tears.

• Obamacare premiums will probably go up next year, but it doesn’t sound like anyone will be able to blame pharma.

• The NYT put a spotlight on a new HHS OIG report on coverage denials in Medicaid. You probably don’t need to read the whole thing if you just look at this one chart.