Comer Launches Investigation into Pharmacy Profit Managers’ Role in Increasing Health and fitness Care Charges

WASHINGTON—House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today is launching an investigation into pharmacy gain managers’ (PBM) strategies that are harming affected person treatment and raising expenses for people. Chairman Comer is contacting on senior officials at the Business office of Personnel Administration (OPM), Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Solutions (CMS), and the Defense Wellness Company (DHA) for paperwork and communications to figure out the extent PBMs’ practices influence health care plans administered by the federal governing administration. Moreover, Chairman Comer is contacting on the biggest PBMs—CVS Caremark, Categorical Scripts, and OptumRx—to provide documents, communications, and information similar to their methods that are distorting the pharmaceutical industry and restricting higher excellent care for patients.

“Pharmacy Benefit Managers’ anticompetitive strategies are driving up health and fitness care charges for Us citizens and harming affected individual treatment. Federal agencies administering well being treatment systems for seniors, active-obligation armed forces, and federal workforce rely on PBMs as middlemen to set drug selling prices, which opens the door to govt squander at the expense of American taxpayers. Larger transparency in the PBM business is crucial to figure out the influence that their tactics are having on patients, the pharmaceutical marketplace, and wellbeing care systems administered by the federal authorities. The Household Oversight and Accountability Committee is shining a light-weight on this problem in the health care system and will proceed to look at options to make prescription medicines much more cost-effective for all People,” said Chairman Comer.

CVS Health’s CVS Caremark, Cigna’s Categorical Scripts, and United Wellbeing Group’s Optum Rx handle an approximated 80 per cent of the PBM market. In Committee Republicans’ December 2021 report, original findings exposed that large PBM consolidation has negatively impacted affected individual wellbeing, enhanced expenditures for consumers, pressured brands to increase their costs, and produced conflicts of desire which distort the market place and limit large good quality treatment for people.

Beneath are the letters Chairman Comer sent now:

Read far more:

PBM Discussion board Wrap Up: Larger Transparency, Even more Congressional Overview Necessary to Decreased Drug Price ranges

Comer Releases Report on PBMs’ Ways Primary to Soaring Prescription Drug Rates