With all the focus on the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion provisions of the Affordable Care Act, relatively little attention has been paid to the multitude of provisions in the Act that affect pharmaceutical policies including pricing, reimbursement, benefit management and marketing. Yet there is a lot there, and there are potentially opportunities for legislators to expand some existing state programs and look for alternative ways to implement other policies such as PBM transparency, disclosure of gifts and payments to physicians, datamining, academic detailing and more. NLARx Executive Director Sharon Treat presented briefly on many of these provisions, and the legislators and legislative staff present agreed that a future NLARx meeting should be devoted to exploring the ACA and the opportunities for state legislators to expand on policies in the Act, such as marketing disclosure, and potentially to use the rules of the Exchanges to promote greater transparency in PBMs as well as to fine-tune data and electronic record privacy provisions.
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