The problem with drug prices is that the makers of drugs set their prices too high. The solution is increasing competition and the work PBMs do everyday — negotiating on behalf of employers and government health programs to reduce those prices.
When we sit across the table from employers and government payors who are trying to make medicines affordable for their employees and members, they are well aware drugmakers are solely responsible for making medicine unaffordable. They also know what we do every day to drive down costs.
That simplicity is lost in the broader discussion, where Big Pharma would like anyone else to be blamed as they throw out all kinds of disinformation and mischaracterizations. That doesn’t change the bottom line: drugmakers are putting medicine out of reach.
Big Pharma has sent their lobbyists into overdrive over the past decade, spending tens of millions of dollars on ad campaigns that shift blame as to why medicine is more expensive here than elsewhere. When you hear misleading messages like this, remember pharma companies alone set and raise the list price of drugs in the United States. Our Caremark customers hire us to push back against pharma's US price-gouging, and they appreciate the savings we’ve been able to deliver for them and their members — as evidenced by our annual client retention rate of 97%.
Those Caremark customers include many top pharmaceutical companies, who select us to push back against OTHER drugmakers to help keep their own employee benefits affordable. Would these companies — some of the savviest corporations on the topic of US drug supply chain dynamics — do this if we weren’t generating meaningful savings on their behalf?
CVS Caremark has launched several initiatives to drive greater affordability for individual patients, greater price transparency for the organizations that hire us, and financial protection for the independent pharmacies around the country that serve our members. These are options we provide to all our customers as they consider how they want to structure their pharmacy benefits. Those customers — and the benefit consultants they hire to manage the selection of a PBM — weigh these options, select a PBM, and tell that PBM which options they would like to have implemented on their behalf. The result: we save them billions of dollars a year on drug costs that help get their members access to the drugs they need.
You can call us middlemen if you want, but you also can call us successful at doing exactly what our customers ask us to do.
