LETTERS: PBM Middlemen Cause High Prices

To the Editor,

There's a simpler explanation for high pharmacy bills in Gonzales than the one coming out of Washington, and it doesn't involve any other country's prices. The explanation is the middlemen.

Pharmacy Benefit Managers sit between drug companies and patients. They collect discounts on medicines, and those savings don't always make their way down to the people at the counter. They also shape how patients get treated. Under step therapy rules, someone can be required to try a cheaper drug and have it fail before the benefit manager will pay for the medicine their doctor actually chose. Letting a patient stay sick longer to save a middleman money is a practice that should have ended long ago.

Washington's attention is on Most Favored Nation pricing instead, a plan to import foreign price controls. From the details I've read, I don't think it would change much of what any of us pay, because that's not what MFN is aimed at. What it might do is starve American drug research over time, and our overseas adversaries would be glad to watch it happen.

Congress had a chance at real PBM reform earlier this year, and the job isn't finished. As our representatives spend August back home, with an election this fall, I'd urge them to see that work through. It would do more for this community than anything copied from abroad.

Grant Gautreaux

Gonzales, LA