Medicaid

CMS Administrator Seema Verma on Wednesday (May 22) said the agency is taking its time with a national Medicare coverage policy for new expensive hospital-administered cancer drugs, which was due to be published May 17 but was delayed, because the policy will affect coverage of drugs other than the two chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies already on the market.

After legislative talks between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and President Donald Trump ground to a halt Wednesday morning, Senate Finance Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is helping lead negotiations on health care policy, said the Senate was always in the driver’s seat in the drug-pricing debate.

A Georgetown University report released Wednesday (May 22) says expanding Medicaid is key to reducing maternal mortality and improving preventative care in women of childbearing age, a position shared by maternal health advocates who also say Medicaid coverage can be improved.

CMS Deputy Administrator and Director of the Center for Medicaid & CHIP Services Chris Traylor announced his departure from CMS Friday (May 17) months after taking on the role, making him the fourth person to leave the role in the last 18 months and the third departure of a top CMS official in the past couple of weeks.

Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) introduced a bill Tuesday (May 14) that would allow Medicaid enrollees to choose to use a pre-paid “swipe card” to purchase medical care -- a proposal Green said would drive down costs and introduce more competition into the health sector, but one policy analyst said might instead drive up costs.

The attorneys general for five states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday (May 13) over a final rule issued earlier this month that repeals an Obama-era rule allowing union dues to be deducted from Medicaid payments made to independent home health workers.

CMS is considering whether to allow states that partially expand Medicaid to receive the enhanced federal funding historically reserved for full Medicaid expansion, CMS Administrator Seema Verma said Wednesday (May 8).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) office is working on a drug-price negotiation bill that would use arbitration as a backstop to price negotiations between HHS and drug makers on high-cost drugs, and the resulting price could be available to other payers, not just to Medicare plans, sources briefed on the plan told Inside Drug Pricing.

The cost of implementing a new system to administer payments from drug makers to pharmacies under the Trump administration’s point-of-sale rebate proposal would increase premiums by about 1 percent of the amount of the chargebacks, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.