How a Drug Price Drop Lands in Your Clotting Factor Fee
CMS set the 2027 clotting factor furnishing fee at $0.270 per unit yesterday, a 1.89% raise and the third-smallest in twenty-two updates. The fee pays for labor, and it is indexed to a basket where drug prices fell 2.1% this year. Twenty-two years of that blend put it 1.4 cents a unit behind, worth $3.3 million a year across Part B.
Medicare's clotting factor furnishing fee goes to $0.270 a unit on January 1.
It is $0.265 today. That works out to a 1.89% raise, the third-smallest in the twenty-two annual updates CMS has published since the fee started, and the reason has nothing to do with what it costs you to receive, store, log, split and ship factor.
CMS issued it yesterday as Transmittal 13937, Change Request 14580. Effective for dates of service on or after January 1, 2027, installed in the shared systems January 4.
Four pages, one number.
"Why is the fee for handling a drug indexed to the price of the drug?"
The Formula Is Not Yours
Section 80.4.1 of Chapter 17 states the rule in a single sentence. The fee "is updated each calendar year based on the percentage increase in the consumer price index (CPI) for medical care for the 12-month period ending with June of the previous year."
So your 2027 rate was decided by what happened between June 2025 and June 2026.
Medical care ran +2.0% over that window. Run the arithmetic CMS ran: 0.265 × 1.02026 = 0.27037, which rounds to the published $0.270.
The agency applied its own formula correctly and there is nothing here to appeal.
What matters is the composition of that 2.0%.
Medical care splits in two.
Medical care services, the hospital stays, physician visits and health insurance, rose +2.9% over the same twelve months. Medical care commodities, meaning prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs and medical equipment, fell 2.1%.
A furnishing fee compensates labor. It is indexed to a basket in which the price of the drug you are being paid to handle gets a vote.
Read the services line alone and the CY2027 fee comes out at $0.273.
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The impact tables, the code-level detail, and the rest of the analysis sit past this line.
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