Forum looks for ways to cut high drug costs

One suggestion: Link price with effectiveness

The Obama administration’s top health officials said Friday that the nation needs greater clarity about the cost and effectiveness of prescription drugs as part of a strategy to make medicines more affordable without stunting innovation.

The current scattered system, in which drugs are priced differently depending on who is paying for them, “end(s) up obscuring” their true cost and, in turn, the impact on which patients have access to them, said Andy Slavitt, who oversees Medicare, Medicaid and insurance exchanges in the Health and Human Services department. “We must increase the transparency of the information available about drug pricing and value,” he said.

Slavitt’s remarks were part of a broad, daylong forum to discuss rising drug prices, which have become a dominant policy issue, raising the ire of consumers, sparking fights between sectors of the health care industry and spilling into Congress and presidential campaigns.

The event assembled hundreds of researchers, consumer advocates, company executives and pharmacy benefit managers, as well as insurance industry representatives and state and federal officials.

A central theme was the goal of a system in which the government and private insurers would pay for drugs based on their effectiveness.

“For the sake of patients, our health care system, and our economy, we must simultaneously support innovation, access and affordability,” HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said.

Mark McClellan, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who directs the Brookings Institution’s Health Care Innovation and Value Initiative, said the government faces policy choices about how much to emphasize new drug therapies versus patients’ access to needed medicines.

McClellan said insurers are experimenting with new drug formularies that charge patients the least for medicine that has been proven to be effective, rather than the traditional method of “tiering” drugs based on cost.

In a panel of consumer advocates, Heather Block said that she is taking an oncology drug that costs $9,800 per month.

“Why must I worry about insolvency as much as I worry about cancer?” asked the Delaware resident, who has metastatic breast cancer.