To support Colorado cancer patients, end “white bagging”

As a community-based hematologist-oncologist, my top priority is ensuring that my patients receive timely, safe, and effective treatment. For my entire career, the standard practice has been for oncologists to manage an onsite drug inventory, allowing us to tailor doses of drugs, like chemotherapy, based on a patient’s side effects or disease progression.

Increasingly, however, insurers and their middlemen, called pharmacy benefit managers, are creating roadblocks to care through “white bagging” policies that force patients to access these treatments through a specialty pharmacy that is owned or affiliated with the insurer. This effectively removes the treating oncologist’s control over these medications and adds unnecessary complexity to a process that has been used successfully for decades. It creates inefficiency by forcing patients who need a day-of dose change to reschedule their appointment and wait for the new medication to be re-prepared and shipped.

If disrupting treatments wasn’t bad enough, white-bagging often increases out-of-pocket costs for cancer patients. Most importantly, white-bagging poses potential safety risks to patients, as oncologists can’t trace the drug through the shipment process.

Thankfully, Reps. Iman Jodeh and Matt Soper, along with Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, have introduced House Bill 1010 this year to restrict the use of white-bagging mandates and ensure that our state’s patients can get the care they need.

Coloradans battling cancer should be focused on managing their health, not cutting through red tape. It’s critical that lawmakers advance this bill to put our patients’ safety over insurer profits.

— Timothy J Murphy, Colorado Springs