Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, delivered remarks Tuesday stating that competition policy and antitrust enforcement had a key role to play in addressing the lack of competition in the U.S. health care system, including the cost of prescription drugs. In his remarks, Kanter used terms and ideas mentioned by NCPA in a prior meeting with him, including the matter of PBMs and the term “platformization of health care.”
Kanter covered a lot of ground in his speech, but he specifically noted the struggles of patients to get prescription drug coverage for certain medications, the soaring costs of Medicare and Medicaid to taxpayers, and the market manipulations from PBMs.
He said PBMs have become large, vertically integrated companies with significant market power at the local level, and that they haven’t used that power judiciously.
“Instead, it is commonplace to hear allegations of PBMs self-preferencing and steering to affiliated pharmacies to the exclusion of others, pushing rebating practices that drive up sticker prices and discourage new drug entry, enabling their affiliated insurers to evade medical loss-ratios and tying PBM and medical insurance products,” Kanter said.
