CONGRESS

On the hot seat, feeling the Bern

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Drug executives will soon have the chance to tell Congress why they’re suing Medicare over price negotiations when their companies sell drugs to all the other governments that negotiate prices, my colleague John Wilkerson reports.

Senate health committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he wants executives of companies that have sued to be among the witnesses at an upcoming hearing on drug prices. His office has started calling those folks to work on scheduling, but formal invitations have not gone out yet. 

“These companies make significant profits in countries all over the world where prices are negotiated,” Sanders told my colleague John Wilkerson in a hallway interview. “Why do they think it’s okay to have Americans pay the highest prices in the world?”

tobacco policy

A gas station-filled Christmas 

The White House’s tiny-but-mighty regulatory office is about to have a rough holiday season. That office, known as OIRA, has slated more than 40 meetings from now until early January to discuss the FDA’s two recent proposals to ban menthol flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars, my colleague Nick Florko reports.

The meetings are yet another example of the intensifying fight over the future of brands like Newport and Black & Mild. As Nick reported last month, tobacco companies have spent the last several months trying everything to drum up opposition to the proposal, including shopping a  letter to members of Congress alleging the policy would exacerbate racial inequity.

This strategy of swarming the White House with meetings has had a major impact before: When the FDA tried to ban flavored vapes during the Obama administration, tobacco companies and their allies did similar and successfully killed the policy.

The lion’s share of the meetings this time around, however, aren’t from tobacco companies at all. They’re from the gas stations and convenience stores that sell these products. The New England and Texas trade groups for convenience stores and gas stations are each meeting with the White House, as is the “Oregon Neighborhood Store Association.” So too are the National Association of Convenience Stores and the National Convenience Distributors – which despite their very similar names are actually separate groups. The Energy Marketers of America have their own meeting on the books too. The Society of Independent Gasoline Marketers of America and the National Association of Truck Stop Operators, however, have apparently agreed to have a joint meeting: They’ll be chatting with the White House today at 10:30 a.m. 

medicare agency

CMS weighs capping Medicare Advantage broker pay

Medicare wants to rein in spending on lavish broker bonuses for MA sign-ups. But even with more guardrails in place there are still plenty of incentives to move people into MA plans, STAT’s Bob Herman writes. 

If the rule is finalized, brokers won’t be able to accept more than $632 for each new Medicare-eligible person they enroll in an MA plan. That’s a little more than the base compensation they can accept right now, but Bob writes that big insurers have found other ways to lob big incentives at brokers. Of course, many smaller health plans have complained the practice tilts the scales in favor of the giants. 

The new definition of broker compensation would crack down on those extra incentives. But it likely won’t stop brokers from increasingly placing people into MA plans over traditional Medicare, he writes. More from Bob.