The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on Wednesday, Dec. 3, entitled "Making Health Care Affordable Again: Healing a Broken System."
Witnesses included Marcie Strouse, owner and partner of Capitol Benefits Group; Claudia M. Fegan, national coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program; and Joel White, president of the Council for Affordable Health Coverage.
Multiple senators brought up the role PBM reform could play in improving health care affordability, with Sens. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) bringing up the committee's bipartisan work on this issue.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said, "This committee passed a fantastic, bipartisan PBM reform bill a year ago, again on the middleman theme. I don't like the consolidation of the insurance industry and that huge profit margin that jacks up everybody's costs. And I don't like pharmacy benefit managers who don't do any medical research, who don't produce any products. I don't like them charging based on a percentage of the drugs that they're sending out, which gives them an incentive to not focus on low-cost, affordable drugs, but skew the market toward higher-cost drugs, so that they'll make more money for basically doing nothing ... we should do that bill right now."
Asking the witnesses whether PBM reform would be a good idea, Fegan said it is "essential." While Strouse asserted that "a one-size-fits-all does not solve the problem," she conceded that "We have a few that are the greedy middlemen."
Later in the hearing, Hassan said, "The PBM reform that we're talking about that was in a bill that was ready to be passed on the floor of the United States Senate last year, until Elon Musk ... essentially vetoed what was a bipartisan bill ... we've all got to return to some of the work that we have done and get to it, understanding that it's come through the committee, understanding that it reflects a lot of bipartisan work."
You can watch the whole hearing here.
