The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) will hold a hearing on June 8th to explore the economic aspects of the opioid crisis.
According to the JEC website, “The opioid problem has various elements on the demand and the supply side that JEC witnesses, Professor Sir Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, Dr. Lisa Sacco, Congressional Research Service Crime Policy Analyst, and Dr. Richard G. Frank, Professor of Health Economics at Harvard will address in detail.” Mike DeWine? Really?
We’ll see.
I suspect that a key aspect of “opioid economics” that will get very little attention is the unwillingness of PBMs to pay for opioids of the abuse-deterrent variety. That’s simple economics. The reason that there are nearly a quarter of a billion generic, non-abuse opioid tablets prescribed annually (vs. about 5 million abuse-deterrent ones) is because they are inexpensive. But that is a failed metric. It’s benefited the bottom line of PBMs and created a national epidemic.
The same math explains why PBMs often implement barriers to the use of branded, on-label non-opioid medicines, relegating these treatments to second line options. 52% of patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis receive an opioid pain medicine as first line treatment as do 43% of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia and 42% of patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy even though there are FDA-approved, non-opioid medicines specifically designed and labeled to treat these conditions.
We’ll see.
Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics. -- P. J. O'Rourke
According to the JEC website, “The opioid problem has various elements on the demand and the supply side that JEC witnesses, Professor Sir Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, Dr. Lisa Sacco, Congressional Research Service Crime Policy Analyst, and Dr. Richard G. Frank, Professor of Health Economics at Harvard will address in detail.” Mike DeWine? Really?
We’ll see.
I suspect that a key aspect of “opioid economics” that will get very little attention is the unwillingness of PBMs to pay for opioids of the abuse-deterrent variety. That’s simple economics. The reason that there are nearly a quarter of a billion generic, non-abuse opioid tablets prescribed annually (vs. about 5 million abuse-deterrent ones) is because they are inexpensive. But that is a failed metric. It’s benefited the bottom line of PBMs and created a national epidemic.
The same math explains why PBMs often implement barriers to the use of branded, on-label non-opioid medicines, relegating these treatments to second line options. 52% of patients diagnosed with osteoarthritis receive an opioid pain medicine as first line treatment as do 43% of patients diagnosed with fibromyalgia and 42% of patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy even though there are FDA-approved, non-opioid medicines specifically designed and labeled to treat these conditions.
We’ll see.
Zero-sum thinking is an obsession of mine, but mostly in economics. -- P. J. O'Rourke
