Sept. 20 (UPI) — The Federal Trade Commission on Friday filed lawsuits against three prescription drug benefit managers or PBMs over concerns the companies are artificially inflating the list price of insulin drugs.
The FTC lawsuit contends Caremark Rx, Express Scripts and OptumRx engaged “in anticompetitive and unfair rebating practices,” leading to the artificial price inflation as well as impairing access to lower cost drugs, and shifting “high insulin list prices to vulnerable patients,” according to a statement issued Friday.
Alabama-based Caremark, Minnesota’s OptumRX and Missouri-based Express Scripts are the country’s three largest PBMs.
The lawsuit also names the three companies’ affiliated group purchasing organizations or GPOs.
The three companies “created a perverse drug rebate system that prioritizes high rebates from drug manufacturers, leading to artificially inflated insulin list prices,” according to the FTC complaint.
That complex system allowed the companies to keep hundreds of millions of dollars in rebates rather than return the money to patients, according to the FTC. They also allegedly used the allure of rebates to lure new clients.
The agency contends that even when lower drug priced insulin was available, the PBMs “systemically excluded” vulnerable patients in favor of higher-priced options with large rebates.
The filing points out the average cost of a brand-name insulin drug in 1999 was $21, but increased to more than $274 by 2017, an increase of 1,200%.
It goes on to say one out of every four insulin patients became unable to afford their medication by 2019.
“Millions of Americans with diabetes need insulin to survive, yet for many of these vulnerable patients, their insulin drug costs have skyrocketed over the past decade thanks in part to powerful PBMs and their greed,” FTC Bureau of Competition Deputy Director Rahul Rao said in the agency’s statement.
“Caremark, ESI, and Optum-as medication gatekeepers-have extracted millions of dollars off the backs of patients who need life-saving medications. The FTC’s administrative action seeks to put an end to the Big Three PBMs’ exploitative conduct and marks an important step in fixing a broken system-a fix that could ripple beyond the insulin market and restore healthy competition to drive down drug prices for consumers.”