As If There Weren’t Enough Reasons to Hate Them with a White Hot Passion

It turns out that Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) extorted money from pharmaceutical companies to in furtherance of the pharma companies peddling addictive drugs.

Seriously.  Just shut them down.  Make them illegal.

In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. The company said it was “putting the brakes on the opioid epidemic” by making it harder to get potentially dangerous amounts of the drugs.

The announcement, which came after pressure from federal health regulators, was followed by similar declarations from the other two companies that control access to prescription drugs for most Americans.

The self-congratulatory statements, however, didn’t address an important question: Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades?

One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to.

For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

Let's be clear here.  PBMs did not, "Take,"  payments from big pharma, they did not, "Accept," payments from big pharma, they DEMANDED payment. 

Demanding payment from drug manufacturers and pharmacies is their whole business model.

………

The documents reviewed by The Times — including contracts, invoices, emails, memos and financial data — span more than two decades, beginning with the debut of OxyContin in 1996. Many came from a public repository of records unearthed during court cases and investigations. The Times also obtained more than 200 previously confidential documents from plaintiffs in litigation against drugmakers, P.B.M.s and others.

In the public assignment of blame for the opioid epidemic, the P.B.M.s have largely escaped notice. Drugmakers, distributors, pharmacies and doctors have paid billions of dollars to resolve lawsuits and investigations. But more recently, the largest P.B.M.s have been in the legal cross hairs.

………

But this often presented the clients with a fraught choice: If they added restrictions, they could lose the rebates that helped make coverage affordable.

In addition, documents show that P.B.M.s sometimes collaborated with opioid manufacturers to persuade insurers not to restrict access to their drugs.

Fines are not enough.  Jail the mother-f%$#ers.