CMS Announces Part D Premiums Are Going Down

On July 31, 2017, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that Medicare Part D premiums will drop in 2018. The announcement states that the Part D national average monthly bid amount for 2018 will be $57.93, the 2018 Part D base beneficiary premium will be $35.02, and the de minimis amount will be $2. This decrease is the first drop in five years, in part because of the bids submitted by drug plans for basic coverage in Part D and because rebates and other price concessions are projected to grow faster than drug costs. The decline comes amid reports of surging spending in Medicare on specialty drugs. "This is encouraging news for the nearly 43 million seniors who are enrolled in the program," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Part D offers “an abundance of competing choices in each region and uses cutting edge, cost-saving tools like pharmacy networks and home delivery,” Mark Merritt, president and chief executive officer of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, told Bloomberg BNA after the announcement. National Average Monthly Bid Amount The national average monthly bid amount is a weighted average of the standardized bid amounts for each stand-alone prescription drug plan and MA-PD plan described in section 1851(a)(2)(A)(i) of the Act. The weights are based on the number of enrollees in each plan. The reference month for the 2018 calculation was June 2017. As noted above, the national average monthly bid amount fo...
Source: Policy and Medicine - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs