The Federal Trade Commission is suing the titans of the pharmacy benefit manager industry for anticompetitive practices and artificially raising the price of insulin drug prices, the agency announced Friday.
The complaint alleges that Optum Rx, Express Scripts and Caremark — all vertically integrated with UnitedHealth Group, Cigna and CVS Health, respectively — caused patients to pay more for life-saving drugs and engaging in “rigging pharmaceutical supply chain competition in their favor.”
The FTC has been pulling no punches thrown at the “Pharmacy Benefits Managers” (PBMs) lately. They published a scathing report earlier this summer damning the PBM industry, and it was so bad that Express Scripts sued to have them retract some of their statements from the report. (I believe the response from the FTC did not include an immediate retraction).
