Insurance Companies Partner With Drugmakers To DROP Covered Meds

Health insurance companies are working alongside drug companies to make sure that you can’t get a good deal on your prescription drugs. The process is complicated and shady, but the end result is always the same – you pay more and these companies watch their profits go through the roof. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Check out our merch by visiting our store

Subscribe to our podcast

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Health insurance companies are working alongside drug companies to make sure that you can't get a good deal on your prescription drugs. The process is complicated and it's very shady. The end result is that you pay through the roof for the cost of pharmaceuticals. Now, here's what people don't, most people watching this would've never even heard of a PBM. Okay. We're handling the insulin case. It's where PBMs are setting drug prices, and they're doing it through price gouging. It's antitrust. As a matter of fact, I've got a book coming out following December, about this very issue. It's in the series. But it's focusing on, it's fiction, but it's focused on the heart of the problem. PBMs came up in the sixties, and they were supposed to be there to protect consumers to make sure that pharmaceutical company doesn't overcharge. Now that PBM is taking kickbacks. So they want the price of the pharmaceutical to be as high as possible. They have three different avenues of kickbacks. One is just when they set the price. They put 'em on a list. Right. If you have your pharmaceutical on the list, you can sell it. These people can keep you off the list. And so it's, I mean, it's a extortion. We'll put your expensive product on the list, but we want a kickback. They're literally taking, they call 'em rebates, but they're kickbacks.

Rebates. So yeah. These are pharmacy benefit managers. The PBMs. And what a lot of people don't know, and the Lever did a beautiful job of explaining this.

Oh, by the way, let me, if people, people always say, I can't find the news, go to the Lever.

Yeah. It's wonderful.

This is an extraordinary source of news. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead.

No. It needed to be said. So you have these PBMs that are now increasingly actually being owned by the insurance companies. Now, they used to be kind of this independent group. The insurance companies are here, your PBMs, and then your drug companies.

Right. Check and balance.

Right. The PBMs were kind of the intermediary saying, okay, insurance, you have to cover this. Drug companies, you gotta cover it at this price. Everybody's happy. But the insurance companies said, well, what if we just owned the PBMs?

Right.

Let's just cut out the middleman. We create our own system here. So as you said, they now own the PBMs, and the PBMs are going to the drug companies and saying, hey, we're gonna have to drop your drug. But, if you come off the price a little bit of what we'll cover, and you give us the difference.

Yeah. That the PBM said.

Right.

It's extortion. It's nothing less than, they call it rebates. They, oh, this is only a rebate. No, it's a kickback. You say to the pharmaceutical company, you're not gonna be on the formulary list. We're not even gonna recommend that your drug be able to be sold in these various pharmacies like CVS or whoever. And the people making those decisions also own the pharmacies. Right?

Yeah.

So we're saying we want the most expensive drug. If you got a generic or you have a hundred times the cost of generic, we want that expensive one on the formulary list because the PBM gets a kickback and the pharmacy makes more money by selling the more expensive drug. Right?

Yeah. So it's, just to give kind of a little bit of an example here. Say you've got a drug that big pharma would charge you $500 for if you didn't have insurance. Well, if you don't have insurance, you're not gonna be able to afford that medication. So the insurance company says, listen, we will cover it, and the cost of the consumer will be a hundred dollars. So you're coming off $400.