Karolinska University Hospital and Sheba Medical Centre join forces to develop innovative solutions

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Two of the world’s top ten leading hospitals have signed a Memorandum of Understanding in a new collaborative partnership.
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How Billing Turns a Routine Birth Into a High-Cost Emergency

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Caitlin Wells Salerno knew that some mammals — like the golden-mantled ground squirrels she studies in the Rocky Mountains — invest an insane amount of resources in their young. That didn’t prepare her for the resources the conservation biologist would owe after the birth of her second son.

Wells Salerno went into labor on the eve of her due date, in the early weeks of coronavirus lockdowns in April 2020. She and her husband, Jon Salerno, were instructed to go through the emergency room doors at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, because it was the only entrance open.

Despite the weird covid vibe — the emptiness, the quiet — everything went smoothly. Wells Salerno felt well enough to decline the help of a nurse offering to wheel her to the labor and delivery department. She even took a selfie, smiling, as she entered the delivery room.

“I was just thrilled that he was here and it was on his due date, so we didn’t have to have an induction,” she said. “I was doing great.”

Gus was born a healthy 10 pounds after about nine hours of labor, and the family went home the next morning.

Wells Salerno expected the bill for Gus’ birth to be heftier than that for her first child, Hank, which had cost the family a mere $30. She was a postdoctoral fellow in California with top-notch insurance when Hank was born, about four years earlier. They were braced to pay more for Gus, but how much more?

Then the bill came.

The Patient: Caitlin Wells Salerno, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University and a principal investigator at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. She is insured by Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield through her job.

Medical Service: A routine vaginal delivery of a full-term infant.

Total Bill: $16,221.26. The Anthem BCBS negotiated rate was $14,550. Insurance paid $10,940.91 and the family paid the remaining $3,609.09 to the hospital.

Service Provider: Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, operated by UCHealth, a nonprofit health system.

What Gives: In a system that has evolved to bill for anything and everything, a quick exam to evaluate labor in a small triage room can generate substantial charges.

The total bill was huge, but what really made Wells Salerno’s eyes pop was a line for the highest level of emergency services. It didn’t make any sense. Was it for checking in at the ER desk, as she’d been instructed to? She recalls going through security there on her way to labor and delivery, yet there was a $2,755 charge for “Level 5” emergency department services — as if she had received care there like a patient with a heart attack or fresh from a car wreck. It is the biggest item on the bill other than the delivery itself.

Dr. Renee Hsia, a professor of emergency medicine and health policy at the University of California-San Francisco and a practicing ER doctor, said Level 5 charges are supposed to be reserved for serious cases — “a severe threat to life, or very complicated, resource-intense cases” — not for patients who can walk through a hospital on their own. Emergency room visits are coded from Level 1 to Level 5, with each higher level garnering more generous reimbursement, in theory commensurate with the work required.

But over the past 20 years, hospitals and doctors have learned there’s great profit in upcoding visits. After all, the insurer isn’t in the exam room to know what transpired. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that between 2001 and 2008 the number of Level 4 and 5 visits for patients who were sent homefrom the ER nearly doubled to almost 50% of visits. In Colorado, the Center for Improving Value in Health Care looked at emergency visit billing from 2009 to 2016 and found that the percentage of emergency visits coded as Level 5 steadily grew from 23% to 34% for patients with commercial insurance.

After repeated calls questioning the line item on her bill, Wells Salerno eventually got a voicemail from the billing department, which she shared with KHN, explaining that “the emergency room charge is actually the OB triage little area before they take you to the labor and delivery room.” 

A customer service representative later explained it was for services given there when a nurse placed an IV for antibiotics, and her doctor checked her dilation and confirmed her water had broken — although none of that was performed in the Emergency Department. And those services, performed before every delivery, are traditionally not billed separately — and are routine, not emergency, procedures.

Some hospitals provide that package of services via an “obstetrical emergency department.” OB-EDs are licensed under the main Emergency Department and typically see patients who are pregnant, for anything from unexplained bleeding to full-term birth. They bill like an ER, even if they aren’t physically located anywhere near the ER.

Health care staffing company TeamHealth — owned by the investment company Blackstone, and known for marking up ER bills to boost profit — essentially says an OB-ED can be as simple as a rebranded obstetrical triage area. In a white paper, the company said an OB-ED is an “entrepreneurial approach to strengthening hospital finances” because with “little to no structural investment” it allows hospitals to “collect facility charges that are otherwise lost in the obstetrical triage setting.”

The OB Hospitalist Group, which is owned by a private equity company, markets a tool to help OB-EDs calculate levels of emergency care. In a case study, OB Hospitalist Group reported that hospitals “leave a lot of money on the table” by billing OB-ED visits as Level 1 and 2 emergencies when they could be considered Level 4 emergencies.

An Arizona facility said its revenue increased $365,000 per quarter after turning their obstetric triage area into an OB-ED. Poudre Valley Hospital’s website doesn’t list “OB-ED” as part of the facility’s offerings, though UCHealth documents do reference OB-ED beds in other facilities.

KHN spoke with four other women who, after giving birth at Poudre Valley in 2020 and 2021, received ER charges on their bills after healthy births. They had no clue they had received emergency services. One wrote a warning note on Facebook to other area moms after getting a whopping charge — for the 10 minutes she spent in the triage room, while fully dilated and in active labor.

In Wells Salerno’s case, UCHealth and her insurer have an agreement that Anthem BCBS pays a lump sum for vaginal delivery, rather than paying for line items individually. “Being seen there in OB-ED did not impact this bill whatsoever,” said Dan Weaver, a spokesperson with UCHealth.

But in one of the other moms’ cases, it did: The hospital received $1,500 from the insurer for that charge, and the mom was on the hook for an additional $375 for coinsurance.

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Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, said it’s a “questionable” billing practice, and one that can matter to those who don’t have the same kind of insurance as Wells Salerno, or have none at all.

Dr. Mark Simon, chief medical officer with OB Hospitalist Group, said OB-EDs can help women avoid being admitted to the hospital too early in labor, ensuring timelier, more appropriate care.

UCHealth’s Weaver said they can also help pregnant patients with actual emergencies like preterm labor, preeclampsia or vaginal bleeding get quick care from specialists available 24/7, often without having to be admitted to the hospital. But at hospitals like Poudre Valley, healthy women having healthy births also get routine “OB-ED” treatment, without their knowledge.

Weaver said the only time someone in labor would not go through the OB-ED — and therefore the only time they would not receive the emergency charge — is if they have a scheduled induction or cesarean section or are directly admitted from a provider’s office.

Hsia, the UCSF researcher and ER doctor, is unconvinced: “If they’re actually going to charge a special fee that you didn’t get directly admitted from your physician, that’s absolutely ridiculous.”

Wells Salerno’s “OB-ED” exam was performed by her clinician, but the OB-ED charge still showed up on her bill.

Resolution: After trying to determine that the charge wasn’t a mistake, Wells Salerno eventually threw in the towel and paid the bill.

“I was at a very vulnerable time during pregnancy and immediately postpartum,” she said. “I just felt like I had kind of been taken advantage of financially at a time when I couldn’t muster the energy to fight back.”

The fact that two healthy brothers could come with such different price tags isn’t surprising to Dr. Michelle Moniz. “There is no clinical reason that we have this level of variation,” said Moniz, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan and its Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. Her research shows that people with private insurance pay anywhere from nothing to $10,000 for childbirth.

“You don’t get what you pay for,” said Wells Salerno, who maintains that — despite their price difference — both of her children are equally “awesome.”

Data from the Colorado Division of Insurance shows that Poudre Valley typically received about $12,000 for similar births in 2020, about 43% more than the typical Colorado hospital. So the more than $14,000 Wells Salerno and her insurer paid is very high.

The Takeaway: Anything in our health system labeled as an emergency room service likely comes with a big additional charge.

Expectant parents should be aware that OB-EDs are a relatively new feature at some hospitals. Ask whether your hospital has that kind of charge and how it will affect your bill. Ahead of time, ask both the hospital and your insurer how much the birth is expected to cost. In Colorado, the Center for Improving Value in Health Care offers a price comparison tool for common medical procedures, including vaginal delivery.

If you do require a genuine ER encounter, look at your bill to see how it was coded, Levels 1 to 5 — and protest if your visit was misrepresented. Ask, “Has this bill been upcoded?” You are the only one who knows how much time you spent with a medical provider and how much care was given. Here’s a chart that will help with the proper definition of each level.

Know that victory is possible. At least one mom won the battle and got the emergency charge removed from her Poudre Valley Hospital birth bill. It took hours on the phone with UCHealth, a lot of confidence and countless repetitions of the birth story — and how an emergency charge for a routine delivery just didn’t, and doesn’t, make sense.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Medicare Plans’ ‘Free’ Dental, Vision, Hearing Benefits Come at a Cost

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When Teresa Nolan Barensfeld turned 65 last year, she quickly decided on a private Medicare Advantage plan to cover her health expenses.

Barensfeld, a freelance editor from Chatham, New York, liked that it covered her medications, while her local hospitals and her primary care doctor were in the plan’s network. It also had a modest $31 monthly premium.

She said it was a bonus that the plan included dental, hearing and vision benefits, which traditional Medicare does not.

But Barensfeld, who works as a copy editor, missed some of the important fine print about her plan. It covers a maximum of $500 annually for care from out-of-network dentists, including her longtime provider. That means getting one crown or tending to a couple of cavities could leave her footing most of the bill. She was circumspect about the cap on dental coverage, saying, “I don’t expect that much for a $31 plan.”

Through television, social media, newspapers and mailings, tens of millions of Medicare beneficiaries are being inundated this month — as they are each autumn during the open enrollment period — by marketing from Medicare Advantage plans touting low costs and benefits not found with traditional Medicare. Dental, vision and hearing coverage are among the most advertised benefits.

Those services are also at the center of heated negotiations on Capitol Hill among Democrats as they seek to expand a number of social programs. Progressives, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are pressing to add dental, vision and hearing benefits to traditional Medicare.

Despite the high-powered advertising of the Medicare Advantage plans pitched by the likes of celebrities Joe Namath and Jimmie Walker, beneficiaries still generally end up with significant out-of-pocket costs for many of these services, a recent study by KFF found. That’s partly because the private plans limit benefits. While people in traditional Medicare paid on average about $992 for dental care in 2018, those in Medicare Advantage plans paid $766, according to the study. For vision, people with traditional Medicare paid $242, compared with $194 for those covered by a Medicare Advantage plan.

“It stands to reason there would be lower out-of-pocket spending in Medicare Advantage than in traditional Medicare, but the differences are not as large as one might expect,” said Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at KFF and executive director of its Medicare policy program.

More than 26 million people were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans for this year — 42% of all Medicare beneficiaries. Enrollment in the private plans has doubled since 2012 and tripled since 2007. Unlike traditional Medicare, these private plans generally allow coverage through a limited network of doctors, hospitals and pharmacies.

Open enrollment for 2022 plans runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, and some Advantage plans offer enticements such as hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries, home-delivered meals or $1,000 in over-the-counter items such as adhesive bandages and aspirin.

But many seniors don’t realize there are restrictions on these benefits. They may cover extras only for enrollees with certain health conditions or have a narrow network of providers or annual dollar limits, often around $100 for vision or $1,300 for dental.

“All these extra benefits encourage people to sign up, but people don’t know what they have until they try to use it,” said Bonnie Burns, a training and policy specialist for California Health Advocates who helps Medicare beneficiaries evaluate their health plan options.

Seniors typically can choose from more than 30 Medicare Advantage plans sold by several insurers. The choice is so daunting that fewer than a third of seniors bother to shop and compare during the open enrollment window — even though costs and benefits change every year.

And for those who want to shop around, comparisons are not easy. The Medicare.gov website provides an overview of health plan costs and benefits and lets seniors compare plans’ premiums based on what medications the beneficiary uses. But it doesn’t offer a comparison of which doctors, dentists or hospitals are in the Medicare Advantage network or provide details about limits on dental, hearing and vision care. For that information, consumers must go to each insurer’s website and read through a summary of benefits that can be dozens of pages long.

Mary Beth Donahue, CEO of the Better Medicare Alliance, a research and trade group representing Medicare Advantage plans, sees things differently. “Medicare Advantage’s flexible benefit design means that beneficiaries can choose a plan tailored to their needs — whether that means more robust coverage, or more basic coverage, potentially for a lower cost,” she said.

Casey Schwarz, senior counsel for education and federal policy at the Medicare Rights Center in New York, an advocacy group for seniors, said the extra benefits offered by plans have increased confusion among beneficiaries. Those benefits come at a price.

“There is almost always a trade-off such as narrower provider networks, tighter drug formulary or restrictions in other areas,” she said.

Jenny Chumbley Hogue, an insurance broker near Dallas and an analyst at medicareresources.org, which helps seniors navigate the program, said marketing misleads some of her clients. “They see a TV ad that says they can get everything for free when they may not qualify for those benefits,” she said. “It’s hard to know if they are misinformed or not reading the fine print.”

She added that consumers should choose a plan based on whether their doctor is in that network or their drugs are covered at the lowest cost. For example, while most plans offer a hearing aid benefit, it’s usually only for a certain type of aid from a single company, Chumbley Hogue said.

“The devil is in the details, particularly when it comes to dental,” she said. “The coverage is not typically what they are used to coming from an employer plan.”

Medicare Advantage dental benefits are becoming more robust, though. Nearly 90% of the private plans offer dental benefits at no extra cost and most offer coverage for treatment as well as cleanings and checkups, according to a report by the consulting firm Milliman. The percentage of plans offering preventive and comprehensive dental has jumped to 71% this year from 48% in 2019.

Plans also are increasing benefits so they meet Medicare’s requirement to spend at least 85% of enrollees’ premium dollars on health services, Neuman said. Plans that don’t reach that threshold can face sanctions, including not being allowed to enroll new members.

While some consumers may find the dental benefit alluring, not everyone uses the coverage. The Medicare plan may not cover their existing dentist, so they continue to pay out-of-pocket, she said.

Medicare Advantage beneficiaries use their dental benefits less frequently than people with dental coverage through their employer, said Joanne Fontana, a principal with Milliman. “Not everyone buys a plan because it covers dental,” she said, “and it’s not top of mind or they [don’t] think to go the dentist every year.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Pharma Campaign Cash Delivered to Key Lawmakers With Surgical Precision

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The Biden administration and Congress are embroiled in high-stakes haggling over what urgent priorities will make it into the ever-shrinking social spending bill. But for the pharmaceutical industry there is one agenda: Heading off Medicare drug price negotiation, which it considers an existential threat to its business model.

The siren call to contain rising drug costs helped catapult Democrats to power, and the idea is popular among voters regardless of their politics. Yet granting Medicare broad authority to intervene in setting prices has nonetheless divided the party.

And so, as it normally does, the drug industry gave generously to members of Congress, according to new data from KHN’s Pharma Cash to Congress database. Contributions covering the first half of this year show that some of its biggest donations were delivered with surgical-strike precision to sympathetic or moderate Democratic lawmakers the industry needs to remain in its corner.

Campaign donations to members of Congress — which must be reported to the Federal Election Commission — are the tip of the iceberg, signaling far greater activity in influence peddling that includes spending millions on lobbying activities and advertising campaigns.

Unusually, in the first half of this year Republicans and Democrats in Congress were virtually neck and neck in pulling in drug industry money, according to a KHN analysis of campaign contributions. In prior years, Republicans dominated giving from that sector, often by huge margins.

Pharmaceutical companies and their lobbying groups gave roughly $1.6 million to lawmakers during the first six months of 2021, with Republicans accepting $785,000 and Democrats $776,200, the Pharma Cash to Congress database shows. Since the 2008 cycle, the industry has generally favored Republicans. The exception was 2009-10, the last time Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House.

Democrats again narrowly hold both the House and Senate, and political scientists and other money-in-politics experts said the contributions likely reflect who is in power, which lawmakers face tougher reelection bids next year, and who has outsize sway over legislation affecting the industry’s bottom line.

Several pharmaceutical companies paused contributions to Republican lawmakers who voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election, blunting the GOP’s total fundraising haul and overall industry giving compared with other years.

The drug industry’s campaign contributions are markedly strategic, said Steven Billet, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.

“This is a really well-organized commercial sector,” Billet said. “If I’m one of these PACs, I’ve surveyed the landscape at the front end of the process, decided on our agenda and budget, and figured out who I may be able to get to and who I wouldn’t be able to get to.”

Of the top 10 recipients of funding, Republican lawmakers accounted for six; Democrats, four. Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) received the most money of any member of Congress, with $63,900 in contributions in the first half of the year. Peters, whose San Diego-area district includes multiple drug companies, has consistently accepted money from drugmakers since he took office in 2013, according to KHN’s database. Right behind Peters was Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who received $50,000 from the industry in the first six months of 2021. McMorris Rodgers was chosen this year to be the most senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has significant influence on pharmaceutical issues. Peters sits on the same committee.

“They’re typically going to saturate the committees that are relevant to their industry,” said Nick Penniman, CEO of Issue One, a nonprofit that advocates reforming money’s influence in politics.

Next in line was Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who accepted $49,300, the most of any senator this year despite not facing reelection until 2024. The vote of Menendez, a longtime ally of the industry, would be crucial for Democrats to pass any proposal giving the government greater control over drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry is a major employer in New Jersey, home to headquarters of behemoths like Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi.

Menendez said he’s waiting to see the proposal, “which I expect will include language to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.”

“The focus of any proposal must be lowering patient costs,” he said, “and that will drive my analysis.”

Among other moderate Democrats is Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), whose vote also is critical to passage. She received $108,500 in pharma contributions in 2019-20, according to the KHN database. However, in the first half of this year, she received only $8,000. She has not said publicly where she stands on the current pricing proposal.

As Billet sees it, the pharmaceutical industry knew allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices would likely be on the table, and drug companies shored up members, such as Peters and Menendez, who have sided with them in the past. Plus, “right now, the Democrats are driving the train, and because of that they’re going to get a few more contributions,” Billet added.

Peters received funds from nearly two dozen companies or industry groups, including Eli Lilly, Takeda Pharmaceutical, Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, EMD Serono and Amgen. Menendez’s donors included Boehringer Ingelheim, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly, Teva and Novo Nordisk. A spokesperson for Peters did not respond to request for comment.

Controlling drug prices has broad support among adults regardless of political party, according to polling from KFF (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF). But facing industry opposition, Democrats have yet to agree on a plan as lawmakers weigh which policies make it into a massive domestic spending bill to expand the social safety net and address climate change. Central to the industry’s argument is that greater government intervention in setting prices would harm new drug development; however, drug pricing experts generally say this argument is overblown. Republicans remain unanimously opposed, which means Senate Democrats can’t afford any defections to advance legislation.

Fourth in industry contributions was Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), a freshman lawmaker on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, which oversees legislation pertaining to federal health programs like Medicare. Cortez Masto received $46,000, with cash flowing in from companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, the latter of which filed for bankruptcy in 2020 after being swamped with litigation over its alleged role in the opioid crisis. One of her recent aides, Eben DuRoss, was hired as a lobbyist this year by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, federal disclosures show.

Cortez Masto is up for reelection next year in a battleground state that’s been competitive between Republicans and Democrats in recent elections. She was narrowly elected in 2016, and recent polling showed she held a small lead against her expected Republican challenger in 2022, former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt.

But her contributions dwarf those of other Senate Democrats in close races. For example, in the first half of this year, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who also sits on the Senate Finance Committee, reported having accepted $6,000.

Two other lawmakers in competitive seats, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), didn’t receive funding from the pharmaceutical sector.

Sarah Bryner, research director of OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics, noted several reasons Cortez Masto would pull in more money. In addition to her committee seat and competitive race, politically she’s more moderate than progressive lawmakers who have been bigger agitators against the drug industry.

“She’s not seen as an extremist, which is the kind of person who would typically take in more money” from political action committees, Bryner said.

Cortez Masto was also a recent past chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and therefore heavily involved in the party’s national fundraising efforts to preserve Democrats’ Senate majority. Those relationships with corporate and other donors could be leveraged for her own race, Bryner said. “Once you’ve made all the relationships, it’s not like they just disappear,” she said.

Still, the freshman Democrat has openly supported allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, in contrast to Menendez, who voted against the idea in 2019. The Nevada senator recently told KHN that she “absolutely” backs the policy and that the pharma cash flowing into her campaign coffers doesn’t influence her decisions.

“I’ve already supported it in Finance and actually voted to pass legislation to do just that,” Cortez Masto said. “We need to reduce the health care costs for so many in this country, and that’s what I’m focused on doing, including reducing prescription drug costs.”

Peters — who unseated a Republican in 2012 — was one of four moderate House Democrats who in September voted against a plan to give Medicare broad authority to negotiate prescription drug prices. They backed a narrower alternative that includes caps on out-of-pocket spending and limits the scope of Medicare’s negotiating authority to a smaller set of medications.

The money Peters and McMorris Rodgers got from drugmakers ($63,900 and $50,000, respectively) significantly jumped from the same periods in past cycles. In the first half of 2019, Peters received $19,500, and during those same quarters in 2017 he got $36,000. McMorris Rodgers’ haul for the first six months of 2019 was $2,500, and two years earlier it was $3,000. However, Menendez received more funding in the first half of 2019 ($52,000) than this year.

That some drugmakers — including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead and Eli Lilly — as well as PhRMA and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, another lobbying group for the industry, paused contributions to Republicans after the events of Jan. 6 seems at least in part to account for overall pharma contributions dropping in comparison with other years. In the first half of 2019 drugmakers gave $3.7 million, and in the first half of 2017 they gave about $4.4 million, versus 2021’s $1.6 million.

However, other drug company PACs and their industry groups kept up contributions or failed to void checks they’d issued to those who refused to certify the election results, according to a KHN analysis of the FEC data.

They include Merck, Novo Nordisk, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Genentech, Boehringer Ingelheim, Amgen, Teva, EMD Serono and the Association for Accessible Medicines, which all gave $1,000 or more to at least one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results.

Direct contributions to lawmakers’ political accounts are only one way for the industry to channel cash to Congress. Companies also give money to trade associations and 501©(4)s, which are nonprofits that often function as “dark money” groups because they are not required to disclose their donors.

“We know that they’re giving; they didn’t stop giving. Their giving went underground,” said Carlos Holguin, research director for the Center for Political Accountability, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics.

Groups also funnel money into advertising — in September, PhRMA announced a seven-figure ad campaign opposing Democrats’ drug pricing plan — or into advocacy groups from which it may eventually trickle down to political candidates.

Another factor? Hail Mary covid-19 vaccines, developed and distributed in record time, that may have shored up goodwill with lawmakers. Or that, despite everything lawmakers have said about lowering drug costs, the industry suspects drug pricing legislation will stall once again and don’t want to spend their political capital on the issue.

“I think, frankly, drugmakers know they’ve won the match when it comes to drug pricing. This whole question of the cost of pharmaceuticals, it has come up for literally decades now and they have successfully shut it down, year after year,” Penniman said. “At a certain point, they know they have driven the nail far enough in the wood and they don’t need to do much more.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Pharma Cash to Congress

On By Stephen McCullLeave a comment

Every year, pharmaceutical companies contribute millions of dollars to U.S. senators and representatives as part of a multipronged effort to influence health care lawmaking and spending priorities. Use this tool to explore the sizable role drugmakers play in the campaign finance system, where many industries seek to influence Congress. Discover which lawmakers rake in the most money (or the least) and which pharma companies are the biggest contributors. Or use our search tool to look up members of Congress by name or home state, as well as dozens of drugmakers that KHN tracks.

Methodology

UPDATE: KHN has removed contributions from Abbott Laboratories after 2013, when the company spun off its pharmaceutical business as Abbvie Inc. Abbott Laboratories is a medical device and health care company.

Kaiser Health News uses campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to track donations from political action committees (PACs) registered with the FEC by pharmaceutical companies. Totals include donations to the principal campaign committees and leadership PACs for current members of Congress. We include only donations to members for election cycles in which they hold office (even if they weren’t in office for the full cycle, in the case of special elections). Donations are assigned to the quarter in which they were given, regardless of when they are reported by the receiving committee or PAC. Exact amounts can change as amendments and refunds are reported; KHN will update the analysis quarterly. Occasionally, refunds are reported in a different cycle from the original contribution, resulting in a negative total for the cycle.

There is a legal limit to how much each PAC can give to a member of the Senate or House of Representatives: $5,000 per election (including primaries and general elections) and per committee, or $10,000 per cycle. Each cycle is two calendar years, e.g. Jan. 1, 2017-Dec. 31, 2018.

When calculating changes in contributions from one cycle to another, we compare the latest quarter in the current cycle to the same point in the previous cycle for all drugmakers and for members of the House, who run for re-election every two years. For senators, who run for re-election every six years, we compare the current cycle to the cycle six years prior. We use the ProPublica Congress API to gather some information about past and present members. We use both Open Secrets and CQ Political Moneyline to collect additional information about PACs and verify our work.


KHN’s coverage of prescription drug development, costs and pricing is supported in part by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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