ICER (The Institute for Constantly Extracting Rebates)

  • by: Robert Goldberg |
  • 05/13/2016
Yesterday Sara Edmond, the chief operating officer of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review and I danced around whether ICER is really patient-centered as she claimed, or rebate-centered as I did. 

Ms. Edmond was a panelist at an  excellent Financial Times sponsored  US Healthcare Life Sciences Summit yesterday.     https://live.ft.com/Events/2016/FT-US-Healthcare-Life-Sciences-Summit  She was joined by Peter Bach, Director, Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Jonathan Emms, Senior Vice President, Global Health and Value, Pfizer Jeff Myers, President and CEO, Medicaid Health Plans of America and Leonard Schleifer, President and CEO, Regeneron.

Praluent, the drug targeting people with untreatable high cholesterol was (along with Amgen’s Repatha) was considered low value by ICER and claimed that it should only be given to 15 percent of all patients who could benefit and at 80 percent of the list price.  

As a Reuters article reports, Dr. Schleifer blasted ICER as unscientific:

"They did all the calculations and they said it's X, which is ok. I could have lived with that. But ... they said society can't afford X, so we are going to say it's one-third X," Schleifer said during a panel discussion.
"They had value-based pricing, but they just decided that well we can't afford it. That wasn't scientific. There was no intellectual honesty there."

ICER Chief Operating Officer Sarah Emond, on a panel with Schleifer, countered that budget impact is part of the equation.
"You're attacking the science of an independent non-profit whose entire mission is tied to opening the black box of pricing," she said.

Which lead me to challenge Edmond from my seat in the audience about ICER’s so called independence. 

I said:  “ICER is not independent, it is largely funded and overseen by PBMs and insurers.”

Edmond responded that most the money came from the Arnold Foundation but I pointed out that the Arnold foundation grant is a one time thing.  

I then said that ICER’s value metric reflects the PBM and insurer interest and ignores patient value.  Further, the low QALY by default becomes a price control or price cap that doesn’t make drugs affordable or available.  Instead, the lower price only maximizes rebates that don't go to patients. More important, for all her talk about opening a black box I noted that ICER never mentions that PBMs run the $115 billion rebate racket.  

She said that since ICER doesn't have rebate data they have to use list price.

People laughed and Schleifer asked:  You estimate everything else, why not rebates? 

Finally I reiterated that under the ICER framework, not only would drugs for HIV, cancer, etc. be rejected but that next generation medicines would not be developed.    She responded, if we pay for Hep C drugs then we will have to lay off teachers and close schools." 

That drew another laugh.  

Edmond claims that ICER "uses science, we use math."  But she was unable to rebut the claim that the math supports the kind of creative accounting that reduces drug prices and maintain PBM and insurer profit margins. 

ICER's self anointed claim of being a trusted and independent organization was debunked.  Indeed, the other FT summit panelists talked about plans, providers and drug companies sustaining innovation and generating value while realizing that in doing so some ‘stakeholders’ – hospitals and PBMs – would go the way of Blockbuster video.   

Maximizing PBM and insurer rebate revenue is a self-serving enterprise that is sustained by increasing the spread between list prices and acquisition cost.   ICER was created and is funded by groups that profit from this enterprise to validate a QALY for that financial goal.  

In its current form ICER stands for the Institute for Constantly Extracting Rebates.

Now the black box is opened. 
CMPI

Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization promoting innovative solutions that advance medical progress, reduce health disparities, extend life and make health care more affordable, preventive and patient-centered. CMPI also provides the public, policymakers and the media a reliable source of independent scientific analysis on issues ranging from personalized medicine, food and drug safety, health care reform and comparative effectiveness.

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