FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For media inquiries, please contact: Reggie Rucker, ILSR communications director
“In addition to raising costs, PBMs have also used their control over prescription benefits to undermine independent pharmacies,” says Stacy Mitchell.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 24, 2024) — The Institute for Local Self-Reliance released the following statement from Stacy Mitchell, co-executive director at ILSR, in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) lawsuit against dominant pharmacy benefit management (PBM) companies for artificially inflating insulin drug prices and boosting profits at the expense of patients:
“The FTC is suing some of the most predatory corporations in health care. This is welcome news for patients. For far too long, these powerful prescription middlemen have been allowed to abuse their market power to illegally inflate drug costs and juice their own profits at the expense of sick people In addition to raising costs, PBMs have also used their control over prescription benefits to undermine independent pharmacies and steer patients to their own — typically lower-quality and more expensive — pharmacies instead, including their own mail-order operations.
“We applaud the FTC for taking action. We hope additional enforcement will follow to address PBMs’ anticompetitive tactics against local pharmacies and eliminate the conflicts-of-interest inherent in these vertically integrated companies. We also implore federal and state lawmakers to swiftly address these issues by enacting new legislation targeting PBMs.”
For more than a decade, ILSR has worked to expose and end the market power abuses that have been killing off local pharmacies and harming the communities they serve.
- “Prescriptions” chapter in Power Play: How Monopolies Leverage Systemic Racism to Dominate Markets, by Susan R. Holmberg, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, June 2024.
- How the FTC Protected the Market Power of Pharmacy Benefit Managers, by Stacy Mitchell and Zach Freed, ProMarket, February 19, 2021.
- Small pharmacies beat big chains at delivering vaccines. Don’t look so shocked, by Stacy Mitchell, Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2021.
- Fighting Monopoly Power: Pharmacy by Zach Freed, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, July 2020.
- A Rebirth of Indie Pharmacies Could Cure Rural Ills by Stacy Mitchell and Charlie Thaxton, The American Conservative, Nov. 2019
- The View from the Shop—Antitrust and the Decline of America’s Independent Businesses by Stacy Mitchell, Antitrust Bulletin, Nov. 2016.
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