March 8, 2011—The Office of Pharmacy Affairs (OPA) is down three staff members from its all-time high of 19 in December and is losing a fourth at the end of this week.
The departures reportedly are hitting the office hard, as it is under an informal hiring freeze given ongoing uncertainty about its budget. OPA’s spending for the current fiscal will run out on March 18 and it will be forced to close along with the rest of the federal government if Congress fails to pass either a stopgap or long-term extension of spending for all government operations.
House Republicans are demanding about $60 billion in cuts in fiscal 2011 government-wide, all of which would fall with half of the fiscal year already over. Congress has already cut $400 million in earmarks from the budget of OPA’s parent agency, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).
Lt. Cmdr. Devin Williams, OPA’s longtime overseer of 340B ceiling prices, announced during a federal drug pricing conference in Baltimore yesterday that he is leaving the office at the end of this week to take a new post at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The others who have recently left OPA are: Kathy McGee, former director Jimmy Mitchell’s deputy; Stephanie Hammonds, who worked on OPA’s Patient Safety and Clinical Pharmacy Services Collaborative (PSPC), and Bhavani Pattabiraman, whose main duties included registering new covered entities. McGee retired, Hammonds accepted a pharmacy position at a health system in Baltimore, and Pattabiraman moved to a different post in HRSA.
Williams begins his new job as a project officer for fraud detection in CMS’s Medicaid Integrity Group next week. He explained that he sought the position at Baltimore-based CMS for family reasons.
“I loved working at OPA,”he said. “They’re great people to work with and for.”Current OPA staff member Lt. Patrick Neubert is assuming Williams’ pricing duties. Pedley said others might be assigned to help fill Williams’ role if necessary.
Former OPA director Mitchell, who was also attending the drug pricing conference, said the office’s inadequate funding is putting the 340B program “at significant risk.”
“You can only carry out those responsibilities for which you have resources,”Mitchell said. “Krista is under a hiring freeze and facing the prospect of a significant reduction of money. Her options are becoming very limited. You prioritize things to keep the program running, and then you discontinue services.”
Just last week, Pedley formally announced significant reductions in the technical assistance services offered by her office’s contractor, the Pharmacy Services Support Center (PSSC).
And in response to a question from a drug industry representative during the Baltimore conference, Williams noted that due to limited funding, OPA is recertifying the 340B eligibility only of those covered entities that it is required to by statute.
“We have a staff of 15 and about 17,000 covered entity records and we just can’t recertify them all,”Williams said.
“If [Pedley’s] appropriation drops to zero, which is a real possibility, then you can take your pick of what to discontinue,”Mitchell said. He said it was vital for Congress to adopt President Obama’s proposal to fund OPA, first in part and eventually entirely, through a new 0.1 percent fee on 340B purchases.