Quick Read: Good News on Drug Price Middlemen
The Wall Street Journal reported something interesting. Investors believe a crackdown on pharmacy benefit managers is coming.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here.
I’ve decided my pieces are too long, so I’m going to write occasional shorter, simpler pieces for paid subscribers. This one’s on the medical middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which are the entities who manage the list of drugs for insurance companies.
While this industry sounds not-that-important, the annual revenue of the top three PBMs in the U.S. is greater than all health care spending in France. So PBMs are big business - $315 billion in revenue annually - and are pushing up the cost of drugs by a noticeable amount.
Oh, and there’s some good news.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to BIG by Matt Stoller to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.