Quality of Treatment Selection

Host Dr. Davide Soldato and Dr. Aaron Mitchell discuss the JCO article "Quality of Treatment Selection for Medicare Beneficiaries With Cancer"

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Davide Soldato: Hello and welcome to JCO After Hours, the podcast where we sit down with authors from some of the latest articles published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I am your host, Dr. Davide Soldato, medical oncologist at Hospital San Martino in Genoa, Italy. Today, we are joined by JCO author Dr. Aaron Mitchell. Dr. Mitchell is a medical oncologist working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center where he is also part of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Mitchell specializes in treating genitourinary malignancy and has a research focus on improving how the healthcare system helps people with these and other cancers. So today, Dr. Mitchell will be discussing the article titled, “Quality of Treatment Selection for Medicare Beneficiaries with Cancer.”

Thank you for speaking with us, Dr. Mitchell.

Dr. Aaron Mitchell: Well, thank you for inviting me. I'm very glad to be here.

Dr. Davide Soldato: So I just wanted to introduce the topic by asking a couple of questions, very general, about the background of the article. So basically you reported the data using the SEER-Medicare to assist to assess the determinants of optimal systemic therapies delivery and selection. So, in particular, you focused on individuals that were diagnosed with cancer who were Medicare beneficiaries and in particular were part of the low income subsidy, which is also known as LIS. So I just wanted to ask you if you could briefly explain to our listeners how this program works, and what was the rationale of the study, and if there is any element of novelty in your study compared to what was done before the study was published.

Dr. Aaron Mitchell: Yeah. So that's a lot to cover, but yeah, a lot of opportunity to introduce the low income subsidy program which is a very important part of the Medicare program for prescription drugs, but often one that flies under the radar a little bit in the policy discussion. So this subsidy was created synchronously back with the Medicare Part D Program, which was created in 2006. There was some anticipation that for some high cost drugs, not all patients would be able to afford them even with the Part D program insurance as it was being created. And so they created a pathway to give an additional subsidy to some patients who had low income, who were anticipated to being at need and needing that assistance to afford high cost drugs. As the number of high cost drugs has really risen since 2006, this program has played an important role in helping patients afford drugs, especially those who need very expensive cancer drugs. 

And what this program does is, once you meet the eligibility requirements, which require patients to have both quite a low income. So if you're single, that is at 135% of the federal poverty limit or below, and it also places some restrictions on assets. You also have to have low assets, so low income and low assets in order to qualify for the subsidy. But then once you do, the subsidy is really quite large. Patients who qualify for the LIS at the full subsidy level will pay about $10 per month per drug, even for specialty cancer drugs. So if you think about drugs such as those that we use to treat prostate cancer, my specialty, drugs like enzalutamide or XTANDI that run $15,000 to $20,000 per month, the out of pocket cost for a low income subsidy beneficiary is $10. So that is a huge discount. $10 isn't nothing, but even for someone with a low income, if they've got one or two cancer drugs that are at this rate, it's something that they can oft