Friday, May 25, 2012

TGIF

It's hard to believe that the unofficial start of summer, Memorial Day weekend, starts tomorrow. The FEHBlog wishes everyone a pleasant weekend.

The FEHBlog is always interested in insurer initiatives to control health cares costs. That's what he was attracted this morning to a Washington Post Wonkblog article about creating tiered copayments for medical services. For many years, health plans have offered tiered cost sharing for prescription drugs. Now Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is offering a 90% lower co-payment ($50 vs. $500) when a member receives an MRI test at a lower cost provider (e.g., a community hospital rather than a teaching hospital). "Blue Cross is currently at work on a more rigorous evaluation of the insurance product to see whether subscribers are actually choosing the lower-cost product" which was introduced in February 2011.

Yesterday. the Senate passed a bipartisan Food and Drug Administration user fee bill which funds the FDA's drug approval process. Of interest to the FEHBlog is the fact that the bill creates user fees for both traditional or small molecule generics and generic biologics. Medpage Today reports that
The user fee agreement with manufacturers of generic biologics, or biosimilars, is less defined, because the pathway for approving biosimilars is still being worked out. That section of the bill -- known as the Biosimilar User Fee Act -- would at first be funded with $20 million annually from the federal government to hire new FDA staff and set assist in setting up a process to review and approve generic versions of biologics.
The House of Representatives may take up this bill next week when it returns after its Memorial Day recess. The Senate's Memorial Day recess started yesterday.

Healthcare IT News reports that "The White House on Wednesday unveiled what it called a "sweeping shift to mobile," an initiative aimed at accelerating efforts to make new and useful services available to consumers on their mobile devices." That tidbit prompted the FEHBlog to search his Iphone apps store for health insurance apps and by golly there are quite a few out there, including Aetna, Coventry, Humana, and the FEHBlog's insurer Carefirst. In that regard, Market Watch reports that "A new study published in the May issue of Clinical Therapeutics shows that patients who participate in a text message prescription reminder program have significantly higher adherence to chronic oral medications than those in a control group." Good news.


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