Showing posts with label WAC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WAC. Show all posts
I still don't think drug ads will include pricing any time soon
So, I was right!
...
Or maybe I was wrong.
...
Or perhaps the jury's still out.
In May, when President Trump released his blueprint for lowering prescription drug pricing, I wrote a blog post saying that I didn't see how FDA had authority under existing regulations to mandate the inclusion of prices in the direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads. I further claimed that getting such a requirement in place would either require a new regulation, or more likely new legal authority.
Well, as some of you might have heard, yesterday, the Trump administration released a new proposed rule that would require pharmaceutical companies to include the Wholesale Acquisition Cost (WAC) in television ads.
I'll have much more to say about this proposed rule as the conversation continues. And I can't decide which verdict to make on my earlier prediction.
I want to make one point here that hasn't been mentioned in any of the coverage I've seen so far.
Too frequently people talk about prescription drug advertising in a vacuum. The assumption seems to be that people know absolutely nothing about anything and on to this tabula rasa the promotions from pharmaceutical companies are forced, brainwashing people into storming their doctors' offices to demand prescription drugs.
That's not true. Not even close.
People care about their health. They care about the health of their children, their parents, their spouses, and others. When they have a health issue, they start looking for information about ways to treat that issue, ideally to cure it, or at least to help mitigate the symptoms and severity of the condition.
Their search for information will (I hope) include an investigation of whether a prescription treatment is the right option, but it will also include the crap that's sold on disreputable websites. Their search will include supplements, with all of the appropriate concerns.
This is relevant to the debate about drug pricing because one reason prescription drugs cost much more than these other options is that they work. We know they work because the FDA has evaluated the science behind them and believes that there's good reason to believe they work.
The other reason they're more expensive is because most people have some form of prescription drug coverage from their insurance, and insurance companies are willing to pay far more to keep their policy holders healthy than most consumers are willing to pay out of pocket.
Throughout the CMS's proposed rule, there are repeated discussions about how information about the WAC will enable consumers to make rational decisions about treatment options. The assumption seems to be that consumers are limited solely to trying to decide between prescription drug A and prescription drug B and that knowing the WAC will somehow enable them to make a better decision between the two. All by itself, this is a deeply suspect proposition.
But the more important point I want to make now is that people aren't trying to decide between prescription drug A and B. They're also considering pseudoscience crap C and possibly dangerous supplement D and over-the-counter treatment E and loads of other options as well.
Currently, people don't know how much prescription drugs cost, and maybe that's a good thing because it keeps people from comparing that $84,000 prescription drug to the $75 pseudoscience product. Acting as if the price is the sole, or even the primary, factor that consumers should use to evaluate treatment options ignores that most of the evaluation doesn't occur purely among different prescription treatments, and it also rarely involves a qualified health care professional.
It's most often a person, maybe a family, alone, or talking with their friends trying to figure out what's wrong and how they can fix it.
The response to including pricing in prescription drug ads could be, as I've said repeatedly, that people are scared away from prescription drugs that would be relatively affordable for the individual.
It also could be that the crap starts getting more expensive. After all, if people grow accustomed to seeing health treatments advertised with a list price of $100,000 or more, then they won't necessarily notice that the item being advertised is a dangerous supplement or pure pseudoscience.
I've noticed over the past few years that more and more ads for supplements have started mimicking prescription drug advertising. They make their logos look like prescription drug logos. They include a risk statement in their ads. To someone who isn't trained in knowing the difference, you could be forgiven for thinking there's no difference between these products and prescription treatments.
Is it really a stretch to think that requiring prescription treatments to include prices will result in those pseudoscience products doing the same, or to worry that the prices they start seeing as their comparator is the now revealed price of the prescription treatment?
People Care about Their Cost for Medicine, Not Pricing
The Kaiser Family Foundation released a poll showing that most Americans of all political persuasions support requiring prices in prescription drug ads, as supported by President Trump.
Ed Silverman of Stat News wrote a story about this poll, including a few comments from me. Later, I mentioned on Twitter that there was at least one important point I didn't tell Ed.
The poll didn't ask people what price to include (WAC, AMP, NADAC, FUL, AAC, SWP, etc.), and that's not surprising, since most people don't realize that there are so many different prices for prescription drugs.
That's an important point. There are tons of prices for prescription drugs, and at the end of the day, none of them correlates with what consumers actually care about.
Consumers care about how much THEY will pay for their prescriptions, but there's no way to determine that for all consumers, so any price that is presented is AT BEST deeply misleading.
What actually determines the price paid by the consumer at the pharmacy counter is a combination of: 1) what insurance (if any) they have, 2) which pharmacy they're using, 3) where they are in terms of their personal/family deductible for the year (or progress toward the prescription drug donut hole for those with Part D coverage), and 4) whether the manufacturer has any sort of copay or patient assistance program.
The WAC for Drug A might be $100, but if my copay is $4, then that's what matters to me. And if Drug B has a WAC of $50, but my copay is $25 for Drug B, then I'm not going to prefer Drug B despite the lower WAC.
I didn't conduct the Kaiser survey, and it would be difficult to ask the right questions to get at this issue, but if the pollsters were to include questions about things such as which price matters to a consumer, or what consumers mean when they say they want the "price" included in the drug ads, I suspect that what they'll find is that when pollsters ask, "Do you want pricing in drug ads?" what consumers hear is, "Do you want the ad to include how much you'll have to pay out of pocket for the drug?"
And unfortunately (or fortunately), there's no way to do that. I don't mean it's very hard to do that. I mean it's impossible to do that. Because the factors (as discussed above) are deeply personal, there's no way a manufacturer can include that information in their ads.
As Peter Pitts noted in a recent column, one factor driving the recent emphasis on drug pricing is the transition to high-deductible plans. As Americans are being asked to shoulder more of the costs out of pocket, they're becoming more aware of the high cost of some prescription drugs.
A few years ago, I learned just how much variety there is among pharmacies even for generic drugs, when I was buying medicine for a family member who did not have health insurance. I called several different pharmacies because the price was solely coming out of my pocket, and I was shocked to learn that the price varied from more than $150 to $10 for a 30-day supply. Needless to say, I chose the pharmacy with the $10 prescription.
All of this is to say that in addition to the issues I've previously discussed on how unlikely it is for FDA to mandate the inclusion of drug pricing in ads, consumers really don't understand what is being proposed, and as a consequence, they're unlikely to be happy with anything that results.
As I said to Ed during our phone call discussing this in comments that wound up on the cutting room floor, this is a situation where consumers are angry at pharmaceutical companies and I suspect that a significant part of the bipartisan support for including pricing in ads is along the lines of, "if pharma companies are against it, then it must be a good idea."
Ed Silverman of Stat News wrote a story about this poll, including a few comments from me. Later, I mentioned on Twitter that there was at least one important point I didn't tell Ed.
The poll didn't ask people what price to include (WAC, AMP, NADAC, FUL, AAC, SWP, etc.), and that's not surprising, since most people don't realize that there are so many different prices for prescription drugs.
That's an important point. There are tons of prices for prescription drugs, and at the end of the day, none of them correlates with what consumers actually care about.
Consumers care about how much THEY will pay for their prescriptions, but there's no way to determine that for all consumers, so any price that is presented is AT BEST deeply misleading.
What actually determines the price paid by the consumer at the pharmacy counter is a combination of: 1) what insurance (if any) they have, 2) which pharmacy they're using, 3) where they are in terms of their personal/family deductible for the year (or progress toward the prescription drug donut hole for those with Part D coverage), and 4) whether the manufacturer has any sort of copay or patient assistance program.
The WAC for Drug A might be $100, but if my copay is $4, then that's what matters to me. And if Drug B has a WAC of $50, but my copay is $25 for Drug B, then I'm not going to prefer Drug B despite the lower WAC.
I didn't conduct the Kaiser survey, and it would be difficult to ask the right questions to get at this issue, but if the pollsters were to include questions about things such as which price matters to a consumer, or what consumers mean when they say they want the "price" included in the drug ads, I suspect that what they'll find is that when pollsters ask, "Do you want pricing in drug ads?" what consumers hear is, "Do you want the ad to include how much you'll have to pay out of pocket for the drug?"
And unfortunately (or fortunately), there's no way to do that. I don't mean it's very hard to do that. I mean it's impossible to do that. Because the factors (as discussed above) are deeply personal, there's no way a manufacturer can include that information in their ads.
As Peter Pitts noted in a recent column, one factor driving the recent emphasis on drug pricing is the transition to high-deductible plans. As Americans are being asked to shoulder more of the costs out of pocket, they're becoming more aware of the high cost of some prescription drugs.
A few years ago, I learned just how much variety there is among pharmacies even for generic drugs, when I was buying medicine for a family member who did not have health insurance. I called several different pharmacies because the price was solely coming out of my pocket, and I was shocked to learn that the price varied from more than $150 to $10 for a 30-day supply. Needless to say, I chose the pharmacy with the $10 prescription.
All of this is to say that in addition to the issues I've previously discussed on how unlikely it is for FDA to mandate the inclusion of drug pricing in ads, consumers really don't understand what is being proposed, and as a consequence, they're unlikely to be happy with anything that results.
As I said to Ed during our phone call discussing this in comments that wound up on the cutting room floor, this is a situation where consumers are angry at pharmaceutical companies and I suspect that a significant part of the bipartisan support for including pricing in ads is along the lines of, "if pharma companies are against it, then it must be a good idea."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)