Pharmacy and our patients scored two significant wins Friday night when a key committee accepted amendments to HR 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to include pharmacy benefit manager transparency and medication therapy management.

Friday night's vote is the third and final House Committee to pass healthcare reform legislation. House leaders will now need to meld the bills passed by the three committees before an expected floor vote in September.

Thanks very much for your actions on these amendments. Even if some of our representatives voted against HR 3200, they supported our amendments. This is a long process to completion.

Now that all our elected officials are headed back home, this is a perfect time for you to introduce or re-introduce yourselves to them. Most likely they will be concentrating on getting an understanding of how their constituents feel about health care reform. Attend one of their local appearances and go shake hands. Make certain they know you are an independent community pharmacist and talk about the two amendments below. Even better, try to get an appointment to visit with your congressman. Ideally, get two or three of your fellow indie pharmacists to go with you.

And as usual, please let us know the result. Click here to send us an e-mail.

Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) submitted the PBM transparency amendment and Congressman Mike Ross (D-AR), chairman of the Blue Dogs' Health Care Reform Task Force, proposed the MTM amendment..

The PBM transparency amendment is a thing of beauty! Here is what it covers:

PBM's fiduciary responsibility to its health plans
Provide all financial information to health plan regarding its enrollees
Disclose to health insurance plan sponsors all the rebates and other discounts they receive from drug manufacturers
Prohibits PBMs that own or are affiliated with a retail pharmacy from sharing patient data from competitor pharmacies with their own retail pharmacy
Gives patients the right of explanation of benefits
Must disclose when a patient is being switched from a lower cost drug to a higher cost drug so the patient (and pharmacist) can question whether the switch is beneficial to the patient's health or being done to increase PBM profits.
Allows patients to know if they are being switched to a higher cost brand name drug, even though a generic was available
PBMs must disclose the actual reimbursement being paid to the pharmacy for a prescription or covered service.
Disclosure of spread pricing-disclosure of actual reimbursement
The PBM must disclose to the health plan the price paid to them by the plan for a prescription and the price the PBM actually paid the pharmacy for that prescription

The medication therapy management amendment is a boon to our patients. Details include:

Identical to HR 3108 introduced by Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR)
More patients could benefit from the medication therapy management (MTM) services provided by pharmacists, especially those with chronic medical conditions.
Many pharmacists provide MTM services under Medicare Part D, and we support efforts to expand and improve those services.
The amendment will expand access to MTM services and allows pharmacists to take a more active role in controlling health care costs while promoting optimal patient outcomes.
Allows pharmacists to play a larger role in reducing improper medication use, which has been estimated to cost $177 billion in treatment costs annually.

Stay tuned!