ALEXANDRIA, VA – The National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) issued a statement via press release from CEO B. Douglas Hoey, pharmacist, MBA, after the Federal Trade Commission published a second interim staff report on the prescription drug middleman industry—specifically pharmacy benefit managers’ (PBMs) influence over specialty generic drugs.

It finds, among other things, that the big three PBMs – Caremark Rx, Express Scripts, and OptumRx, all owned or affiliated with big insurance companies – controlled 44 percent of the commercial specialty generic 30-day market and 72 percent of those drugs were marked up more than $1,000 per prescription. These dispensing patterns suggest that the big health insurers and the PBMs they own may be steering highly profitable prescriptions to their own affiliated pharmacies and away from unaffiliated pharmacies.

The report looks at a range of critical drugs for chronic illnesses, including treatments for cancer and HIV. “While the Big 3 have consolidated and vertically integrated over the years, they increasingly declare expensive medications to be ‘specialty’ to steer patients to a PBM-affiliated specialty pharmacy to the tune of $7.3 billion above the drug cost,” Hoey said.

“They crush their competition by reimbursing their own pharmacies as much as 100 percent more than they reimburse independent pharmacies for the same drug, or more,” he continued. “This exploitative behavior is bad for taxpayers who subsidize Medicare prescription coverage but the FTC report found that commercial employers are getting hosed even worse. It’s no wonder employees are questioning why their employers are listening to insurance brokers who often recommend one of the giant PBMs.”