The Biden administration is planning to rescind a “Most Favored Nation” rule from the Trump administration that would have tested a model requiring that Medicare pay no more for certain drugs than the price paid by some other developed nations.
Nadeem Baig, MD, a gastroenterologist in Oakhurst, New Jersey, and a member of the board of directors of the Digestive Health Physicians Association, said at the time that the association was “distressed, to say the least, with the rushed process of this … interim final rule proposed last month, given the nature and lack of really appropriate input of stakeholders in this process, and skipping of many steps in the process of rule-making at the administrative level. We fear our patients would suffer.”
He noted that “by the government’s own estimates, one in five patients who get these life-altering drugs … would have lost that access,” according to a chart on page 184 of the interim final rule. “A key driver of their savings was the people who were not getting the drugs,” Baig said.
Patients who couldn’t get the drugs from an office-based gastroenterologist might have to scramble to find an alternate site, and “some patients would be driven to hospitals — which are full of COVID — to get these drugs, and usually hospitals charge a higher price to infuse these drugs,” he added. Read More at MedPage Today >>