Whaley proposes charging opioid distributors ‘nickel per dose’
http://fox45now.com/news/local/whaley-proposes-charging-opioid-distributors-nickel-per-dose
DAYTON, Ohio (WKEF/WRGT) – Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley says she has a plan she believes would help Ohio fight back against the state’s opioid crisis.
Whaley, who is also a gubernatorial candidate, says opioid manufacturers are to blame for the crisis and says they are the ones who will pay. Whaley is proposing that opioid distributors will pay a nickel per dose that is given out. Whaley says she would implement the plan if she’s elected governor. “With the dollars we’ll collect with the nickel per dose surcharge, we can begin to restore vital public safety services to the communities on the front lines fighting this epidemic,” Whaley said as she announced the plan Wednesday morning, October 18.
The State Board of Pharmacy reported 631 million doses of opioids were distributed in 2016 across Ohio. Whaley says under her plan, this would translate into $31.5 million for the state. Whaley, a Democrat, says the nickel per dose would give the state sustainable funding to “start repairing the damage across Ohio.”
Filed under: General Problems
It is not opioid manufacturers who are to blame for this crisis. It is the stupid actions of specific individuals who choose to abuse opioids and not follow the medical advice of their providers and this who choose to take opioids without the direction and approval of licensed medical practitioner. .
Isn’t she a special little snowflake…a tax like this is just a slightly more blatant form of highway robbery. It’s not that the pharma houses are culpable her, demonstrable or otherwise. It’s because they have very deep pockets and will be able to absorb the initial blow….and pass it on to their customers as you’ve posited Steve. Now, who ultimately is the customer with the deepest pockets?
Well I’d bet that would be the various 3rd party payers out there who pay for these opioids as part of any given plan’s benefit structure, aka the insurance companies like United, Cigna, Anthem, etc.. So, what will the insurance companies do? Well, on the commercial plans that most of them offer various employers as a bennie for the employees, they will simply switch some of the opioids up to the next highest tier or they will remove some from the formulary. I’d expect a combination of both. For Medicaid plans, well most of the opioids would just become non-formulary and require the prescriber to jump through multiple hoops in order to clinically demonstrate why the member needs this drug.
So now this tax is becoming an unfunded mandate that impacts the prescribers who have to submit rather tedious and time consuming prior authorization (aka PA) requests on their own dime.
What about the sacred cow known as Medicare (and don’t get me wrong, I think the folks on Medicare deserve every bit of the care they receive and deserve more as inflation eats away a little each year at what is provided to them) and the millions of folks on fixed incomes? The third party payers will have to wait until the next calendar year until they can propose a new formulary as there is a huge hurdle to justifying “negative formulary” changes…except…Now if a case for safety can be made strong enough, then such negative changes can and will get made because opioids are horrible and dangerous drugs if one listens to bleach head Barbie and hollow head Ken on the 6 o’clock news each evening, so I suspect that many current formulary opioids would go away too and fairly quickly.
That is the real reason behind such a tax. It’s an end run around the barriers to prohibition De Juris. It’s De Facto prohibition because it makes the big pharma opioids so expensive that most cannot afford them (especially the ones, who due to age or disability or both, cannot afford to pay full cash price for them). It also will serve to enlarge the black market even more and that will continue to justify the existence of our dutiful little drug warriors at the DEA because they need the justification. They are losing their raison d’être that is called Cannabis and rather than retrain these brute squad soldiers (a fitting sobriquet in my book) to perform a useful function in the productive sector, aka the private sector, it’s more still about the State’s addiction to power and money that keeps this charade going. That’s my take anyway.