Pharmacy Benefit Manager Parasites Drive Drug Costs Ever Higher

President Donald J. Trump is right. Too many pharmaceuticals are too damn high, especially compared to the flea-market prices that foreign patients pay for the same drugs. Dr. Wayne Winegarden, a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, estimated last month that a 30-day supply of the weight-loss drug Ozempic costs $418.98 in the USA. But it’s a mere $95.30 in the UK—a 77.25% discount. Jardiance, for cardiovascular disease, run?s $256.66 ?per month here. In Canada: $57.65. That’s roughly 77.5% off. 

Trump’s new Most Favored Nation policy aims to bring U.S. drug bills closer to those overseas. Simply put, this initiative demands that these manufacturers sell “all brand products” at their ?lowest prices among major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

This illusionary bargain? would karate chop the revenues of American drug companies?. ?They typically spend $2.9 billion to bring each new drug to market. These firms also try to recoup losses fueled by the countless once-promising potential therapies that die anonymously in their test tubes. Most Favored Nation is like telling Hewlett-Packard that its $1,500 laptops must sell for just $200— the price that MS-13 quotes for such a freshly stolen computer. 

Great Britain’s National Health Service, Health Canada, France’s l’Assurance Maladie, Germany’s Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung, and similar socialized medical systems are more dapper, less tattooed versions of this notorious Salvadoran prison gang. Rather than pay what Pfizer or Gilead ask for their drugs, bureaucrats at these government-run medical monopolies dictate take-it-or-leave-it prices to these companies.

To avoid total exclusion from these markets, U.S. laboratories say: “Thank you, sir. I’ll have another!” These labs then? charge U.S. patients and insurers higher prices to compensate for the artificially low prices extorted by these rip-off countries.

??Lower revenues—due to foreign drug thieves and Most Favored Nation’s attempt to undo their economic distortions— will discourage U.S. pharmaceutical companies from creating costly new treatments and cures. 

In 2018, per the National Academies Press, “Two-thirds of new drugs in the past decade and more than 80% of the drugs in the world’s biopharmaceutical pipeline today emerge from the United States.” Tragically, Earth’s entitled free riders will not step up if the American miracle-drug machine sputters, wheezes, and dies.

?For starters, Trump should call? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canadian PM Mark Carney, and French President Emmanuel Macron. He should tell them: “Stop robbing American drug companies. U.S. drugs sell for U.S. prices.” 

What should be done here at home, to make drug prices more reasonable?

Aside from the teachers unions, Pharmacy Benefit Managers are the biggest parasites in America. Leeches ?feasting on lamprey?s have nothing on these value-destroying middlemen.

Imagine ordering a New York Strip at your favorite steakhouse. Suddenly, a Meat Benefits Manager steps forth and ?plants himself among you, ?your waiter, the chef, and the butcher. After mind-numbing discussions and a tornado of paperwork, your $58 steak now costs $100. And the Meat Benefits Manager p?ockets the difference, via the higher tab that he finagled. Tomorrow night, you think a percentage of the higher ?tab that he finagled. Tomorrow night, you ?think, “Why not Campbell’s Soup??”

Invading the personal space of patients, employers, insurers, and druggists, ?America’s Pharmacy Benefit Manager ?cabal raked in $557.5 billion in 2024, IBISWorld estimates. That might be admirable if these companies ?merely offered advice or ?just look?ed handsome. ?Instead, they collect? a ?share of the ?drug prices ?that they oversee. Naturally, they ?hike these ?expenses, so they can drain more blood from ?their increasingly anemic hosts.

“PBM operations are opaque, their revenues streams complex and perhaps most importantly, their operations obscure the actual market price for medicines,” ? Winegarden wrote on May 22. “Due to these flaws, prices for innovative medicines in the U.S. are inflated.”

Trump could help pry Pharmacy Benefit Manager fangs out of the drug industry’s collective neck by insisting on pharmaceutical price transparency. Citing a September 2023 Nephron Research study, Winegarden reported that “$0.42 of every $1 spent on brand medicines for commercially insured patients in the U.S. goes straight to these companies.” Consumers should see drugstore receipts along these lines: “Drug X: $58 + Pharmacy Benefit Manager fees: $42 = $100.”

Such transparency would let the sunshine disinfect the Pharmacy Benefit Managers right out of drug prices. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Pharmacy Benefit Manager Parasites Drive Drug Costs Ever Higher appeared first on The Daily Signal.