Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Cigna requiring its PBM, Express Scripts, to eliminate spread pricing, decouple rebates and fees from the list price of drugs, relocate its GPO, Ascent, to the United States from its current office in Switzerland, and submit to FTC monitoring for a decade. It also forces Cigna to implement a cost-plus model when reimbursing independents with three or fewer locations in commercial plans starting in 2027, or sooner.
NCPA cheered the FTC's actions, noting in a statement that the settlement should help remedy years of unfair business practices on the part of PBMs. NCPA's legal team has been engaging with FTC staff for years to educate them on the PBM practices that squash competition, reduce patient access, and drive up prices.
"This settlement will help lower consumers' copays that have been tied to artificially inflated prices that feed Cigna's insatiable appetite for more and more rebates and GPO fees," said NCPA CEO Douglas Hoey. "The settlement also obliterates the big-PBM industry fiction that they work to lower the cost of drugs for Americans. Obviously, the opposite appears to be true. I hope this is only the beginning of righting the games leading to higher drug prices and harming competition. There remains a need for a deep look into specialty drug classification and steering, and the Express Scripts Prime Therapeutics so-called collaboration, to name a few."
Read the FTC's announcement here, and NCPA's full statement here.
