In a closely watched case, a U.S. federal court judge has temporarily blocked a first-in-the-nation law that would prohibit companies that own pharmacy benefit managers from also operating both retail and mail-order pharmacies in Arkansas.
The state law is designed to eliminate concerns that the largest pharmacy benefit managers — which are controlled by CVS Health, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group — favor their own pharmacy operations. Critics have argued that by doing so, the companies not only dominate the design of health plans for tens of millions of Americans, but distort the distribution and pricing for prescription medicines.
Their pharmacy benefit managers — CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx — processed nearly 80% of the roughly 6.6 billion prescriptions dispensed by U.S. pharmacies in 2023, according to a report from the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier this year, the agency released another report accusing the companies of boosting prices of specialty generic drugs sold through their pharmacies.
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