Alex Azar ’88 confirmed as HHS secretary

According to economics professor and professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice Jonathan Skinner, lowering the prices of drugs is necessary.

“It’s certainly true that when you give drug companies a monopoly through the patent system on particular drugs that they’ve developed and there’s a general policy that Medicare and private health insurance have to pay whatever it is that the drug companies charge,” Skinner said. “It’s not surprising that the prices they charge are very high.”

Skinner added that he believes Azar to have a firm understanding of drug pricing from his experience in the private sector and said that it will be interesting to see whether the secretary is able to bring a “stronger set of tools” to cut back on prices based on his time at Eli Lilly.

The Integrity of MACRA May Be Undermined by “Incident to Billing” Coding.

The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015 ended the Sustainable Growth Rate formula that for years had resulted in an eleventh-hour intervention by Congress to avoid drastic reductions in Medicare physician payments. MACRA also established incentives for clinician payments to become increasingly based on value with the intent of rewarding clinicians who produce better outcomes at lower costs. Efforts are underway to establish the outcomes and quality measures that will be included in the new payment systems.