In case you missed it, former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) explains how the Biden Administration’s recent push targeting pharmacy benefit companies is a deflecting tactic that will only result in increased prescription drug costs in a recent op-ed published in RealClearHealth. Toomey writes:
“Consider the administration’s demagoguery about prescription drug prices and the role of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) in the medicine supply chain. According to SSR Health, a data analytics firm that tracks drug prices, accounting for negotiations and concessions, net drug prices in the first three quarters of 2023 were actually down, while the overall rate of inflation over that time period is up 4.4 percent. Much of that decline in pharmaceutical prices can be attributed to savings generated by PBMs. University of Chicago Professor of Economics Casey Mulligan, Ph.D., concluded that PBMs lower prices by about $148 billion every year. A separate analysis from Visante, a health care consultancy, found that PBMs help save patients, health plan sponsors, and payers $1,040 per person every year. That includes savings across Medicare Part D, Medicaid, and commercial insurance.”
Toomey goes on to highlight a recent White House hosted roundtable that failed to include a balanced conversation of the critical role PBMs play in the prescription drug supply chain to drive down costs:
“To dramatize the political theater of their narrative, the White House recently hosted a “listening session’ claiming to focus on “lowering healthcare costs by focusing on middlemen”—by which they meant PBMs. Turns out, the “listening session” was only interested in listening to one point of view.”
The former senator concludes by describing the recent policies being pushed in Congress that undermine PBMs:
“Among the ill-conceived proposals championed by this administration’s progressive allies on Capitol Hill are policies that: prohibit market-based incentives that allow PBMs to share in the savings they negotiate; eliminate payment options for employers to choose how they pay for their PBM services; mandate 100-percent pass-through of savings secured through rebates, even though plan sponsors already have that choice when designing their benefits; and impose new public disclosure requirements on business-to-business deals that would only undercut the leverage PBMs have to secure savings.
“PBMs have become one of the favorite scapegoats for the Biden administration and anti-corporate zealots in Washington. They are a preferred target for deflecting attention from the inflation disaster President Biden helped create. Republican lawmakers should not help the Biden administration with their attempted diversion. And they certainly should not be accomplices to the administration’s plans to disrupt the delivery of medicines in ways that will result in higher healthcare costs for their constituents.”
Read the full op-ed HERE.
Learn more about the role and value of pharmacy benefit companies HERE.
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PCMA is the national association representing America’s pharmacy benefit companies. Pharmacy benefit companies are working every day to secure savings, enable better health outcomes, and support access to quality prescription drug coverage for more than 275 million patients. Learn more at www.pcmanet.org
