Today, the Partnership for Employer-Sponsored Coverage (P4ESC), an advocacy alliance for businesses of all sizes, filed comments to the U.S. Departments of Labor, Treasury, and Health and Human Services urging regulators to place drug pricing transparency reporting and liability on the entities that own the data - pharmacy benefit managers, third party administrators and other vendors. The comments were filed under the Departments’ Request for Information: Reporting on Pharmacy Benefits and Prescription Drug Costs, Section 204 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021.

In the letter, P4ESC expresses “…concerns about federal health transparency and reporting requirements that put employers, as group health plan sponsors, in the untenable situation of producing information that is not directly owned or accessible by the business.”

Under employee benefits administration, an employer contracts with several separate third party administrators (TPAs), pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and other vendors to facilitate the delivery of various benefits under an employee’s benefits package. The employer is the TPA’s client but does not own the proprietary cost information associated with the employees’ benefits.

The coalition further noted “[e]mployers, as the purchasers and payers of health services for over 181 million working Americans and their families, have a vested interest in health cost transparency and system viability. Employers support bringing price transparency into our nation’s health system to enable businesses and employees to be better consumers of health care. However, P4ESC is very concerned that placing regulatory requirements and liability on employers to report information to which they do not have direct access to or ownership of will unduly burden businesses and increase compliance costs.”

The RFI letter comes on the heels of a letter P4ESC recently sent to the Departments requesting an employer safe harbor from the machine-readable files requirement under the Transparency in Coverage final rule. Both letters are linked below.

P4ESC Letter on RFI: Reporting of Pharmacy Benefits and Prescription Drug Costs

P4ESC Letter on Employer Safe Harbor Under Transparency in Coverage final rule