Insurers and middlemen profiting more from prescription drugs

Vaccines continue to help keep millions safe despite an ever-changing adversary, and there is new hope in the form of treatments that may prevent the most severe outcomes when infections do occur. While science drives us forward, we are also focused on the common goal of finding ways to lower healthcare costs for patients.

As we all look for policies to achieve that goal, it’s imperative to look at all the cost drivers in the prescription drug system, and new data demonstrates for the first time that insurers and their pharmacy benefit managers are siphoning off more profits than ever before.

This new data also showed that payers, including insurers, PBMs, and government programs received more than $140 billion in rebates and discounts from biopharmaceutical companies intended to lower the costs of medicines. However, these savings were rarely, if ever, shared with patients at the pharmacy counter.

Patients need help. We can really begin to impact what patients pay for medicine when we can all agree to cap out-of-pocket insurance costs and require PBMs and insurers to pass on the rebate savings they enjoy to the patients who need them.