PBM Accountability Project Statement on Senate HELP Committee Hearing on Lowering Drug Costs

This week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee will hold a hearing titled, ”Making Medicines More Affordable: How Competition Can Lower Drug Prices.”Mark Blum, managing director of the PBM Accountability Project, issued the following statement:  

“This latest hearing comes at a critical moment. What was once a marketplace built on consumer choice and fair negotiation has become increasingly dominated by vertically integrated insurance conglomerates that control every link in the drug supply chain. This consolidation has created a distorted form of ‘competition’ in name only. Insurers that own PBMs and pharmacies can set and shift costs internally in ways that maximize corporate profit rather than patient benefit, driving up prices across the entire healthcare ecosystem. When these entities control both the delivery and reimbursement of care they effectively determine which drugs are covered, how much patients pay and how or whether independent providers can survive. 

“At the same time, PBMs’ use of offshore group purchasing organizations adds another opaque layer to the system allowing profits and pricing decisions to be routed beyond U.S. oversight while patients and employers pay. 

“The result is not efficiency – it’s entrenchment. True competition cannot exist when market power is concentrated in a handful of vertically integrated insurers steering care and inflating profits at the expense of transparency, accountability, and affordability.  

"Voters agree: there is strong, bipartisan public support for Congress to address this imbalance by ensuring strong oversight of vertically integrated insurance structures and restoring fair market principles that put patient access and affordability first.”