NACDS: Senators Spotlight Ongoing “Pharmaceutical Benefit Manipulation,” Need for Urgent Action

The National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS) today lauded a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-OH) and Committee member Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), which was released on October 1.

The Senators are urging the FTC "to expand its work into additional anti-competitive practices by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that the industry may be using to put up barriers to competition and take in larger revenues."

The letter focuses on the practice of "co-manufacturing" which the Senators describe as "vertical integration of PBMs into yet another aspect of the health system."

NACDS President and CEO Steven C. Anderson said: "This is exactly what NACDS and others have warned about: PBMs have and will morph their practices to keep putting their profits over people and the pharmacies that serve them. This is another example of the pharmaceutical benefit manipulation that now is apparent and overdue for action. This is exactly why Congress needs to enact the bipartisan reforms in Medicare, Medicaid and the commercial markets on which it already has done the hard work. That needs to happen now. At the same time, the Executive Branch and the states also need to do their part to achieve comprehensive reform."

Anderson continued, "Every day without reform is another day of dollars flowing to the PBMs through tactics that now are exposed and well understood. What is already known about PBM tactics, and what is being warned by Chair Wyden and Senator Brown and many others, is a call for urgent action now and for vigilance into the future."

Not only has the Federal Trade Commission released a scathing interim report of PBM tactics, but the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Accountability Committee is conducting and reporting on its own bipartisan investigation. A report by that panel described "findings that PBMs inflate prescription drug costs and interfere with patient care for their own financial benefit."

More information is available at NACDS' Access Agenda microsite.