Who did you think was paying the bills of ICER? The opinions help to give guidance to the insurance industry.
The differences in the descriptions are nuances. There is no need to destroy a product in your description in order to show the differences. The most important comparison to me was based on price. A much higher price for VOS was justified without denigrating the competitor.
IMHO, the rubber hits the road between a highly competent sales force and the prescribers. Any problems in the ICER report will be dealt with by the sales force and backup purveyors of educational information that AUPH has employed.
I only skimmed the salient points of the report as offered in the messages on this blog; but nevertheless, see nothing to be overly concerned about.
Really liked the author's conclusion of that piece:
As Patricia Goldsmith and Carole Florman of CancerCare recently pointed out in STAT, ICER’s latest framework “will continue to exclude disease-specific experts, patients, and caregivers from voting panels; and will maintain review schedules that signal a greater commitment to speed than accuracy.”
I believe that ICER poses a threat to patient access to new therapies. Its cost-effectiveness determinations have been so reliably friendly to insurers that CVS announced late last year a plan that would allow its pharmacy benefit manager, Caremark, to refuse to cover drugs that don’t pass ICER review. That’s a terrifying proposition for drug makers that have invested more than a decade of research and billions of dollars to earn FDA approval and bring products to market and the patients who are desperate to access those treatments.
It will be very interesting to see the final draft of this report on March 26th.
The current draft of this ICER report emphatically sacrifices accuracy over speed in spades.
So far PG and the team at Aurinia deserve very high marks for their ability to navigate the clearly treacherous, ICER infested waters of drug pricing.
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