influence
AAM picks up laid-off BIO exec
Redox reactions – when an atom loses an electron that is picked up by another atom– are common to some basic functions of life, including photosynthesis, respiration, combustion. A similar process is also common to life in Washington, where one trade group loses an executive that is picked up by another trade group, my colleague John Wilkerson writes.
The Association for Accessible Medicines announced Wednesday that it hired John Murphy as its new CEO, John and I scooped yesterday. Murphy previously was the chief policy officer at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, and was laid off in May as part of a major reorganization under BIO's new CEO.
Murphy joins AAM at an interesting time for makers of generics and biosimilars. Intense pressure on generic prices have led to shortages of cancer treatments and injectables.. Rising animosity toward China coincides with drug makers increasingly relying on Chinese drug manufacturing. And Medicare drug price negotiation challenges generic and biosimilar competition as the primary way to control drug costs.
medicare
Final Medicare coverage decision for Alzheimer's drug could take 'years'
Medicare's controversial decision to condition coverage on collecting patient data for even fully approved Alzheimer's drugs is here to stay, per a top CMS official.
Tamara Syrek Jensen, the director of the group at CMS that's responsible for writing national coverage determination policies, doesn't speak publicly often, but she did a brief fireside chat at an event hosted by the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics on Wednesday.
She said the current patient registry in place to collect data on Alzheimer's drugs takes clinicians less than five minutes to complete. The next step will be collecting data from the registry and medical claims to start evaluating the drugs' performance. "We hope to do that over the next…it's not gonna take us months, so over the next few years," Jensen said.
business
Multiplan gets back in the lobbying game
The analytics firm MultiPlan is back in the lobbying game following scrutiny of its business model and legal challenges from hospitals, federal disclosures show.
MultiPlan hadn't had lobbyists in Washington since 2002. That changed this summer, when it hired Forbes-Tate to lobby on health payment issues. And now, the company itself registered an in-house lobbyist this week.
Multiplan's lobbyist is the company's vice president of corporate and government affairs, Peter Henry, who worked at Oracle Health and held several positions working for Senate Republicans before that. He will be lobbying on "health information technology," per the disclosure.
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