America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) engaged The Menges Group to assess West Virginia’s Medicaid pharmacy carve-out impacts, analyzing the findings of another consulting firm’s report. Our analyses suggest that West Virginia’s carve-out has created increased Medicaid expenditures rather than savings. We also provide a large volume of evidence from states that switched to a carve-in approach (comparing their cost per prescription progression to states that maintained their carve out model). These results, taking into account all Medicaid pharmacy claims and rebates in 13 states and across a several year comparison timeframe, compellingly indicate that the carve-in model has yielded large-scale savings relative to the carve-out approach.
Prescriptions for a Healthy America (P4HA) released a report by the Menges Group examining how Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) are combatting prescription drug nonadherence.
The report highlights the efforts of several Medicaid plans and their best practices for improving prescription drug adherence
In commenting on the report’s release, Joel White, President of Prescriptions for a Healthy America made the following statement: “We believe this report is another important contribution to the growing body of evidence that finds medication adherence saves money and improves health. What’s particularly exciting are the strategies outlined in the report can be adopted, today, by Governors across the country as they seek to improve Medicaid in ways that improve patient health, lower health costs and make the health system work better for everyday Americans. We encourage Governors to take notice.”
The report’s lead author, Joel Menges, noted that: “While a large segment of the Medicaid population takes medication daily, the poverty population’s life circumstances can diminish adherence in many ways. The supportive innovations occurring in this arena are of benefit to all stakeholders.”
This report assesses Medicaid MCO quality scores as published annually by NCQA. One of the report’s key findings is that there does not appear to be any relationship between Medicaid MCOs’ enrollment levels and their quality scores. Another is that high-scoring plans are disproportionately concentrated in certain states – with these patterns often recurring (with different health plans in these same states) with regard to quality scores in the Medicare and private insurance sectors. This leads us to conclude that some geographic areas are more conducive to high scores than others – and that MCOs making the same efforts in quality would likely obtain very different quality scores based on the market area in which they operate. Our report also identifies the Medicaid MCOs with both large enrollment and high quality scores, the MCOs that stand out most favorably relative to average scores within their state, and the NCQA-accredited MCOs achieving the greatest improvements in their quality scores between 2010 and 2013.