22 October 2018 - As pharmaceutical companies have faced more heat for their pricing practices, they’ve found someone else to blame: “middlemen” who extract discounts from drugmakers. But in fact, if it weren’t for middlemen like wholesalers and pharmacy benefit managers, drug prices would be even higher.

When Donald Trump was running for President in 2016, he promised to rein in the high price of prescription drugs. “I’m going to bring down drug prices,” he told Time after he’d won the election. “I don’t like what has happened with drug prices.”

The pharmaceutical lobby developed a PR strategy in response to Trump’s promise: blame the middlemen. Pharmaceutical companies, they came to argue, were being forced to charge high prices for their medicines. This was because nefarious middlemen, like pharmacy benefit managers, were demanding discounts and rebates from drugmakers. In turn, the drugmakers were “forced” to charge higher prices to maintain their profit margins.

Read Forbes article