I just talked to my pharmacist about getting my Januvia refilled and by chance asked how much a 30 day refill w/o insurance would cost…. $464 for a month or over $1300 for 90 days. Yeah I’m calling bullsh*t because you may have lowered prices, but we live in an overprescribed society so of course there’s gonna be huge revenue growth with drug prices.
Despite Lawsuits Over Drug Prices, Insurance Giant Touts Revenue Growth, Claims To Have Lowered Drug Costs – By Lydia O’Neal / July 19 2017
As congressional lawmakers feuded over the fate of the nation’s health care system, insurance giant UnitedHealth Group reported stellar second-quarter earnings, which included more than $15.8 billion in revenue for a business segment at the roots of multiple class-action lawsuits against the company — and one that many blame for skyrocketing drug prices in the U.S.
The company faces three class-action lawsuits, one of which is a combination of two earlier class-actions, alleging that it violated the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, which mandates that the insurer and its pharmacy benefit managers act as fiduciaries — that is, act in the interests of their customers. The accusations outline a system of drug price-gouging, in which the pharmacy benefit manager — in UnitedHealth’s cases, OptumRx — allegedly forced pharmacies to charge fraudulent premiums for prescription medications and pocketed the difference.
The pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, have also been accused of imposing so-called “gag clauses” on pharmacies, keeping them from informing customers that they can actually save money by sidestepping their insurers and paying out of pocket. Legislators in Connecticut (ground zero of the U.S. insurance industry) sought to combat the practice with a new law reluctantly signed by the state’s governor this month.
Two bills introduced in the House and Senate in March pushed for greater transparency in the pharmaceutical market and among PBMs. Express Scripts and CVS Caremark — which, together with OptumRx, control 70 percent of the market and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues each year — have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2017 on lobbying efforts related in part to those proposals and other legislation involving PBMs.
Continue to ibtimes.com article: http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/despite-lawsuits-over-drug-prices-insurance-giant-touts-revenue-growth-claims-have
