Freedom Line Blog

Today, the House Oversight Committee is holding an important hearing entitled “The Role of Pharmacy Benefit Managers in Prescription Drug Markets Part III:  Transparency and Accountability.”

For those unfamiliar, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) amount to middlemen that control prescription drugs for millions of Americans.  A majority of Americans receive health insurance through employer plans or government programs such as Medicare, which in turn cover prescription drugs through PBMs.  Those PBMs negotiate with drug companies and pay pharmacies, but throughout the process determine the drugs that insured patients may obtain and at what cost.

The problem is that PBMs operate in such an opaque and complex manner that they’re able to inflate drug costs while claiming to be working to reduce them.  It has reached a point where even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now investigating PBMs’ role in driving up costs for Americans.

Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing accordingly offers invaluable assistance in alerting Americans to PBMs’ ongoing role in unnecessarily increasing drug prices for consumers, and hopefully helps propel reform in this critical realm.