(The Lion) — Insurance companies’ ownership of pharmacies and hospitals is raising consumer costs, but economic competition can counter inflating expenses, according to bipartisan legislation from Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, and Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts.
“We need more competition. We need protections for patients. We need better and cheaper health care,” Hawley told The Lion in an exclusive interview Thursday.
Hawley and Warren reintroduced The Patients Before Monopolies Act last week to counter the monopolized medical field, in step with their second bipartisan bill, The Break Up Big Medicine Act. The Patients Before Monopolies Act prohibits pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen between pharmacies and insurance companies, from owning pharmacies and hospitals, Hawley explained.
“What’s happening is more and more of these insurance companies are buying up everything,” Hawley told The Lion. “They’re buying up the pharmacies. They’re buying up the doctor’s offices. They’re buying up the hospitals.”
As a result, PBMs wield power over every aspect of prescription drugs, from production to delivery, allowing them to increase prices for patients and bankrupt smaller independent businesses, Warren’s press release says.
This corporate overreach has spiked insurance costs and medical bills and decreased the number of private doctors and pharmacies, Hawley explained.
“In Missouri, there’s two whole counties that have no pharmacies at all – zero,” he said. “That’s because more and more of these big PBMs, big insurance, are buying up the small guys and putting them out of business. We need to stop that.”
The Patients Before Monopolies Act would prohibit PBM parent companies or insurers from owning a pharmacy business and would require PBMs that already own a business to end ownership within one year of the bill’s passing.
“It’s time we finally rein in the health care middlemen that are jacking up drug costs and driving small pharmacies out of business,” Warren said.
The bill also allows state and federal departments as well as local pharmacies or private business owners to sue companies that violate the policy.
“When the same corporations control the financing, administration, and delivery of care, patients and independent providers are put at a disadvantage,” Dr. Robert Levin, president of Alliance for Transparent & Affordable Prescriptions, said in a statement. “Healthcare decisions should be driven by what is best for patients, not by vertically integrated corporations maximizing profits through self-preferencing and consolidation.”
