Published April 18, 2022 by Jeff Thompson Chief Clinical Officer at Freeman Health System. Original post on LinkedIn
For the past two years, one drug manufacturer after another has limited the availability of 340b drugs to Covered Entities through contract pharmacies. These actions took several different avenues, with a good number of manufacturers coalescing their position around data submission to the Second Sight, ESP platform.
Lawsuits over this issue have been filed in multiple districts and show no real sign of being resolved any time soon. Despite there being no federal requirement for them to do so, Covered Entities, already hurting from the wounds inflicted by three waves of the COVID pandemic, were bullied into the position that if they didn’t submit data to this platform no 340b discounts would be available to their contract pharmacies. Reluctantly, many health systems began the process of submitting claims data to the ESP platform.
This should be the end of it, correct? The drug manufacturers got what they say they wanted to assure compliance, and the Covered Entities should now be able access 340B priced drugs for their patients. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, to say that this is not the case.
My program has been submitting data for over a month and we are only seeing access to a few items open. It’s much more of a trickle than the floodgates we expected. After all, this was the system put in place by multi-national companies who spend billions of dollars annually on advertising, filing lawsuits and lobbying our elected officials. One would expect that they would keep up their end of their own bargain.
I have spoken with many Covered Entities that are experiencing the same issues with ESP. Again, I’m disappointed but not surprised. Pharmaceutical manufactures have long shown a disregard for the patients and health systems that enable them to reap massive profits at the expense of American Society. Our elected officials are too indebted to the lobbyist that serve pharmaceutical companies and too busy fighting over pointless issues to take action to support the health care community they all leaned on so heavily over the past two years.
Published by
Chief Clinical Officer at Freeman Health System