Posted by Michael Wonder on 03 Oct 2016
Drug makers point finger at middlemen for rising drug prices
2 October 2016 - Pharmacy-benefit managers and the rebates they command come in for criticism by pharmaceutical executives.
As medicine prices rise in the US, pharmaceutical companies are playing down their role, instead heaping blame on the middlemen who help determine how medicines are priced.
Some of the sharpest criticism has come from drug-industry executives who have been grilled by lawmakers or skewered on social media over sharp price increases on their products. They include the chief of Mylan, maker of the lifesaving EpiPen, who says her company is being tarred unfairly for a dysfunctional system in which wholesalers, pharmacies and pharmacy-benefit managers take their own cut of each prescription.
Pharmacy-benefit managers, or PBMs, oversee drug-benefit plans for employers and health insurers. Their job is to hold down the cost of providing those benefits, which they do by choosing which drugs to cover and using that leverage to wrest lower prices from drugmakers through rebates. PBMs keep some of those savings but pass most of it on to their clients.
