NCPA Wants Bidding Exemption for Small Pharmacies

WASHINGTON — In a Jan. 12 letter to Rep. Darrell Issa,
R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and
Government Reform, the National Community Pharmacists Association

repeated its request for a permanent competitive bidding exemption
for community pharmacies.

The letter included the NCPA’s recommendations on several
regulations, including competitive bidding for diabetes testing
supplies, that it said would “undermine patient access to
cost-saving services and disadvantage the small businesses that
provide this care.”

“Federal programs like Medicare place a premium on patient
access, and independent community pharmacies help by often being
located in underserved rural and urban locales. So if burdensome
regulations either limit or end their participation, then many
patients may be left without a reasonable alternative,” NCPA
Executive Vice President and CEO Kathleen Jaeger said in a release
on the letter.

The requirement that diabetes testing supplies and other
products “be competitively bid or subject to a similar pricing
scheme will cause disruption in services, and interim regulations
will prevent community pharmacies from serving homebound
beneficiaries because that service has been placed under the mail
order category even though community pharmacies are supposed to be
exempted from mail order competitive bidding,” Jaeger said.

According to the letter:

“NCPA supports a permanent exemption for independent
pharmacies from competitive bidding, as well as authorization to
continue providing home delivery outside of the competitive bidding
program. Because small independent pharmacies do not get the
discounts that large mail order or chain pharmacies do, if they are
not permanently excluded from the competitive bidding program and
are not authorized to provide home delivery, this will mean that
they will likely drop out of the program, reducing Medicare
beneficiaries’ access to these supplies.”

Read the letter in full at http://www.ncpanet.org/pdf/leg/jan11/ncpa_let_chairman_issa.pdf.

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