Image: U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., speaks on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday, Sept. 23, 2024. Image Credit: Rep. Diana Harshbarger | Facebook
The Center Square [By Alan Wooten] –
Flexibilities from the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services allowing mail delivery of prescribed drugs to Medicare beneficiaries are restored in a Tennessee congresswoman’s legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Seniors’ Access to Critical Medications Act of 2024 removes obstacles, said U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., that returned after allowances were made during the COVID-19 era. The pandemic changes altered what is known as the Stark Law, that medical practices were prohibited to deliver prescribed and filled drugs to patients by mail, courier, or parcel system.
“We shouldn’t have obstacles in the way of patients receiving the prescription medications they need,” Harshbarger, with 37 years experience as a pharmacist, said in a prepared statement. “The bipartisan Seniors’ Access to Critical Medications Act simply ensures that cancer patients as well as other patients have timely access to the appropriate oral medications, by allowing delivery of these medications, or allowing family members or caregivers to pick them up on the patient’s behalf.”
The Stark Law, more formerly known as the Physician Self-Referral Law, also forbids family and caregivers from pick-up.
House approval came by way of suspending the rules and passing the bill on a voice vote. The 69 cosponsors include Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen and fellow Republican Tennesseans Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, David Kustoff and Mark Green.
The legislation has been read in the Senate this week and sent to the Committee on Finance.
Harshbarger said she has heard from “dozens upon dozens” of Tennessee oncologists, other specialty physicians and others around the country.
“For Medicare seniors living in rural areas who don’t have transportation or are too sick to pick up their life-saving drug, they’re simply out of luck in a lot of cases, or they’re forced to rely on a nameless, faceless mail-order benefit manager, where these distant middlemen cannot fine-tune necessary short-term changes or adjustments in the therapies,” Harshbarger said on the House floor. “Patients will go without their oral chemotherapy medication because they can’t get transportation to pick their prescription up and it can change the entire outcome for those patients.”
