Earlier this month, Blue Shield of California, the nonprofit insurer with 3.3 million members, began limiting payments for anemia meds, which at high doses are linked to heart attacks and stroke. And docs were being required to wait until a patient’s anemia is just short of requiring a transfusion before using Amgen’s Aranesp and Epogen, or Johnson & Johnson’s Procrit.

Now, though, the insurer has done a 180 degree turnabout. Blue Shield lifted its restrictions after complaints from cancer docs, Bloomberg News reports. The new policy, updated July 20, lets docs start giving the drugs earlier, when a patient’s hemoglobin level falls to 10 grams a deciliter of blood or lower, Nancy Stalker, Blue Shield’s vp of pharmacy services, tells Bloomberg.

The insurer had told doctors on July 2 they must wait until a patient’s hemoglobin had dropped to 9 grams a deciliter, just shy of requiring a transfusion, before giving them Amgen’s Aranesp and Epogen, or Johnson & Johnson’s Procrit. The drugs have been linked to heart attacks and strokes at high doses and received strict new warnings from the FDAS in March. Medicare, which paid $2 billion for Epogen in 2005, proposed similar limits on the drugs that may begin next month, Bloomberg notes.

“We had the committee re-look into the decision based on concerns expressed by some of our oncologists in our network,”‘ Stalker says. “This had nothing to do with finances. This is clinical.”