Please Act Now to Support Medicare's Essential Patient Protections

Under a dangerous last-minute proposal from the Trump administration, millions of patients may soon lose access to vital medications. Specifically, a proposed demonstration from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) would allow health plans to sharply scale back their coverage of drugs in Medicare’s six “protected classes” — a policy change that would have devastating consequences for patients. This hasty, deeply misguided program would severely jeopardize Medicare beneficiary access to medications used to manage complex conditions such as cancer, mental illness, HIV-AIDS, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and organ transplantation.

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Send a letter to CMS today

​When Congress designed the Medicare Part D program, it ensured that the full range of medications in the six classes of critically important drugs — antidepressants, immunosuppressants, antipsychotics, antiretrovirals, anticonvulsants and antineoplastics — would be guaranteed on all health plans for the patients who desperately need them. Due to the unique and variable ways in which patients respond to different drugs, it has been widely recognized that doctors need to be provided complete discretion to prescribe the most appropriate medicines for their patients. In short, the six protected classes policy has long stood as a guarantee to patients that their access to all available medications for the most serious diseases would never be in doubt.

In response, the Partnership for Part D Access has launched a national grassroots campaign to urge the Biden administration to swiftly rescind this dangerous program. To support this effort, we encourage you to visit our dedicated comment portal to send a letter encouraging the Biden administration to reverse this proposal. Through this portal, we encourage you to: (1) send our draft comment email directly the Biden administration, (2) incorporate our suggested text into your own message, or (3) draft a message of your own. Letters that you submit will be sent from your email directly to the agency. Letters that you submit will be sent from your email directly to the agency.
  
Thank you in advance for your help in echoing the broad opposition to weakening Medicare’s six protected classes policy.