Several of the USA’s biggest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) have generated billions of dollars in revenue by charging “enormous mark-ups,” according to the competition regulator.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday published a second interim staff report on the prescription drug middleman industry, which focuses on PBMs influence over specialty generic drugs, including significant price markups by PBMs for cancer, HIV, and a variety of other critical drugs.
Specifically, the report found that the ‘Big 3 PBMs’ - Caremark Rx, Express Scripts, and OptumRx - marked up numerous specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent, and many others by hundreds of percent. Such significant markups allowed the Big 3 PBMs and their affiliated specialty pharmacies to generate more than $7.3 billion in revenue from dispensing drugs in excess of the drugs’ estimated acquisition costs from 2017 to 2022.
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