​On February 5, 2020, the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission (HPC) finalized regulations outlining their approach to assessing the value of prescription drugs. As groups representing patients and people with disabilities, the affordability of health care is a significant priority. That being said, HPC’s regulations put patient access at risk, and may ultimately do more harm than good for patients. They set the stage for third-party analyses by groups like the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) and rely on international reference pricing, which relies on QALY-based assessments in determining the “value” of treatments. 

​The Friends of PCORI Reauthorization coalition applauds the action taken today to extend funding for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) for an additional ten years. PCORI is an independent organization authorized by the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010” to study how different medications and treatments compare, so patients and their caregivers have the information they need to choose the health care and treatment options that are best for them. The passage of H.R. 1865 shows Congress’ commitment to ensure continued support for critical research helping patients and providers make evidence-based health care decisions that work best for them.

​Washington, D.C. – Today, the Partnership to Improve Patient Care and 37 leading patient and disability organizations submitted a comment letter to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) on their 2020 Value Assessment Framework. Given the serious concerns that stakeholders have raised with ICER’s flawed methodology, the letter urges ICER to put patients and people with disabilities at the center of all assessments to ensure they: (1) are transparent, (2) align with innovative leaders in the field, and (3) do not rely on the use of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and other discriminatory metrics that treat patients as averages. 

Today, the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) released a public opinion poll by Morning Consult regarding the use of cost-effectiveness assessments to determine value of coverage and treatment costs. The survey demonstrates that voters resoundingly reject the main tenets of cost-effectiveness analyses with 82 percent of American voters objecting to their use in determining health care coverage and reimbursement decisions. These types of measures, which are often used outside of the U.S. to limit patient access to medicines, have been frequently criticized as discriminatory by patients and persons with disabilities. Increasingly, policymakers and payers have proposed to use these same tools to limit coverage for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.  

The Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) and over 40 organizations representing patients, people with disabilities and providers submitted a letter to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) in response to their request for input on their value assessment process.  In the letter, the organizations stated, “Simply put, if we aren’t paying for care that patients’ value, we aren’t really paying for value-based care.”