On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee held a hearing on Department of Defense personnel policies and programs that included Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Keith Bass as a witness. Notably, during the hearing, Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Bass on the challenges of the Tricare Pharmacy Program. She called out that Express Scripts both runs the pharmacy program and is a pharmacy competing in the program, giving them an incentive to both overcharge patients and then steer them to their pharmacies.
“How is that deal working out for the taxpayers,” she asked. “Express Scripts reportedly charged DOD $484 more on average for generic drugs dispensed by the Express Scripts-owned pharmacy. Meanwhile, Express Scripts has offered unaffiliated pharmacies such terrible terms that since 2022, nearly 13,000 pharmacies have left the Tricare network.” As she continued to drill down in her questioning, Warren was able to get Bass to commit to an annual audit of the program and to share the data of the audit with the committee.
She also pressed Bass to divulge the difference between what Express Scripts pays their own pharmacies versus what they pay non-affiliates in the Tricare program, to which he also agreed. NCPA applauds these commitments by Bass and looks forward to seeing more transparency come into the Tricare Pharmacy Program. We will continue to work with Warren and the committee as they work on these issues. You can watch her questioning here starting 46 minutes and 26 seconds in.
