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There’s a surprising amount of 340B stuff percolating out there this morning, and it would be tempting to subject you all to a lot of blow-by-blow analysis of each item. But nothing is necessarily game-chaging, and you are all busy professionals.
So know that:**
Manufacturer efforts to roll back state laws that hamstring pharma efforts to restrict contract pharmacies hit another snag (this time in Maryland),
There may soon be a Senate version of a ridiculous House 340B “reform” bill that doesn’t address any of the core issues of the program,
There is an op-ed in The Hill pushing for reform that does address the key issues of the program, and
Avalere has a list of questions related to the intersection of 340B and the IRA. (The analysis came out Aug. 30, but I missed it. h/t to Adam Fein for flagging on LinkedIn.)
The larger point is that 340B has crossed some sort of threshold and is now a topic for polite company. On their own, none of these stories is particularly surprising, but the fact that folks at Reuters and The Hill and Avalere, etc. etc. are now regularly spending time thinking about 340B is a milestone of sorts.
Like so much else in health care, the complexity of the subject has been a meaningful obstacle to reform. 340B has long been a classic “somebody else’s problem”: too convoluted for easy solutions, too obscure to be used to score political points. Only the wonks cared, and that allowed the program to evolve in ways that were — frankly — not part of the program’s original intent.
But we may be moving past the “only the wonks care” stage here. It gets very interesting from here on out.
** This is also an excuse to direct you all to a really well-done two-part Relentless Health Value podcast, where host Stacey Richter and her guest, the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions’ Shawn Gremminger, do an absolutely stellar job of describing what 340B is and how it now affects all of us.
The second part — detailing how 340B distortions are messing with commercial coverage — ought to be required listening for anyone who has ever asked “but does it matter to me?”
Because the answer is, in a big way: yes.
And thanks, too, to Stacey for saying nice things about the Curve.
There’s not much out there, even for Quick Turns. I don’t expect this to last.
This Financial Times piece on the cost of cancer drugs had, like, three or four really good stories embedded within it (e.g. the discussion on “financial optimization”), but no single element of the piece got the kind of deep look it deserved. Still worth the click.
In the summer of 2023, Chuck Schumer sent a letter to his Democratic colleagues pledging to make progress on “on bipartisan bills that lower the cost of insulin and prescription drugs.” Over the weekend, he released another letter. This one said there were “still opportunities for bipartisan cooperation on … lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs.” It was pretty clear — even 14 months ago — that insulin was probably not the best bipartisan way to change the drug price world. That’s even more true today, but pet issues die hard, I guess.
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