Several of the biggest US pharmacy benefit managers have generated more than $7.3bn in revenue by charging “enormous mark-ups” for drugs treating cancer and HIV, according to the US Federal Trade Commission.
A report published by the competition regulator on Tuesday named CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum, which administer about 80 per cent of all prescriptions in the US.
Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, act as middlemen within the pharmaceutical industry. They negotiate rebates from wholesale prices with drugmakers, before passing some of the discount on to consumers and pocketing the rest as profits.