Hochul needs to nix these bills to protect NYers from higher health-care costs

 If Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to protect New Yorkers from needlessly soaring health-care costs, she’ll use her veto pen on several bills still awaiting her signature.

Start with S.4111/A.4688: It would ban changes to formularies (i.e., lists of medications that insurers agree to cover, along with their costs to patients) after the enrollment period. As Gov. Andrew Cuomo pointed out in nixing a similar bill in 2019, insurers would “anticipate and set rates for hypothetical drug price increases, causing higher premiums for everyone.”

Notably, the bill exempts union health plans from the change — an obvious sign its sponsors know the dangers.

Labor groups also get that carve-out in S.3566/A.5854, a bill to block health plans from requiring the use of mail-order pharmacies as a cost-saving measure. Why ban a measure that allows for cheaper insurance?

Also threatening higher costs for consumers and taxpayers: S.3763/A.1396, to establish “pharmacy benefit managers,” and S.6603/A.7598, to boost fees paid by Medicaid plans.

Finally, S.5560/A.5339, would hike taxes by $40 million on health insurers, supposedly to pay for early intervention for developmentally disabled preschool kids (though the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond notes that localities could just pocket the cash without adding to current such spending). Fund that some other way: New York’s health-insurance taxes are already sky-high, a main reason premiums here are among the nation’s highest.

For the most part, these bills are just gifts to Big Pharma at New Yorkers’ expense. Hochul should kill them all to protect the public.

https://nypost.com/2021/12/17/hochul-needs-to-nix-these-bills-to-protect-nyers-from-higher-health-care-costs/