In the United States, a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) is a third-party administrator of prescription drug programs.
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PBMs play a role as the middlemen between pharmacies, drug manufacturers, wholesalers, and health insurance plan companies.
Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.
They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.
I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?
Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.
As a pharmacist I’ll give this my stamp of approval.
Only part I’d throw into this short write up is that 80% of the market is 3 guys - CVS Caremark, Cigna Express Scripts, and Optum. And they all steer to THEIR pharmacies and use this to continue the theft (such as Express Scripts paying a pharmacy in the Tricare military program 1% on a drug of what they pay themselves (using government money, of course)).
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Parasites who make money off of ripping off patients and fucking over pharmacists. They are the rotten core of the US healthcare system and the primary facilitators of the exploitation machine turning your misery into profit.
They negotiate cheap prices from the manufacturers, charge the pharmacies (and by extension the patients) an arm and a leg and pocket the difference.
I believe they’re also the ones that argue with the pharmacist whether the patient really needs that expensive life-saving medication their insurance doesn’t want to cover, because they get kickbacks for saving them money. Sure, you might have cancer, but have you tried Yoga instead of chemo?
Dr. Glaucomflecken has a nice video on it as part of his series on US healthcare.
Jackcooper@lemmy.world 2 days ago
As a pharmacist I’ll give this my stamp of approval.
Only part I’d throw into this short write up is that 80% of the market is 3 guys - CVS Caremark, Cigna Express Scripts, and Optum. And they all steer to THEIR pharmacies and use this to continue the theft (such as Express Scripts paying a pharmacy in the Tricare military program 1% on a drug of what they pay themselves (using government money, of course)).