In order to lower healthcare costs for all Americans, a pivotal and necessary realm to address remains health insurance.<\/p>\n
It’s therefore appropriate that the United States House of Representatives Committees on Ways & Means and Energy and Commerce will hold a timely hearing<\/a> this week with executives representing major U.S. insurance companies.<\/p>\n Currently, the health insurance industry remains highly concentrated<\/a> while American consumers continue to pay higher and higher healthcare costs.\u00a0 At a deeper level, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) amount to middlemen<\/a> that control prescription drugs for millions of Americans.\u00a0 A majority of Americans receive health insurance through employer plans or government programs such as Medicare, which in turn cover prescription drugs through PBMs.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The problem is that PBMs operate in such an opaque and complex manner that they\u2019re able to inflate drug costs while claiming to be working to reduce them.\u00a0 It has reached a point where even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commenced an investigation<\/a> of PBMs\u2019 role in driving up costs for Americans.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why this week\u2019s hearing with insurance company executives is so important, and offers such a critical opportunity to make real, meaningful progress on the ongoing concern to American consumers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s critical to emphasize that the answer to healthcare affordability doesn\u2019t lie in counterproductive<\/a> drug price controls or violating critical patent protections<\/a> for pharmaceutical innovators.\u00a0 That would do nothing to lower healthcare costs, and would instead only make critical lifesaving pharmaceuticals and healthcare innovations less available to Americans.<\/p>\n To improve consumer access and affordability, let\u2019s achieve real reform where it matters \u2013 at the health insurance and PBM levels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In order to lower healthcare costs for all Americans, a pivotal and necessary realm to address remains health insurance. It’s therefore appropriate that the United States House of Representatives Committees on Ways & Means and Energy and Commerce will hold a timely hearing this week with executives representing major U.S. insurance companies. Currently, the health […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5288,5100,5048,2310,861,5047,500,2871,2872,5057,5023,5269,3738],"class_list":["post-26558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-affordability","tag-drug-price-controls","tag-drug-prices","tag-health-insurance","tag-healthcare","tag-healthcare-costs","tag-inflation","tag-intellectual-property","tag-ip","tag-patents","tag-pbms","tag-pharmacy-benefit-managers","tag-price-controls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26559,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26558\/revisions\/26559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}