The National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) is praising a new U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust division task force on health-care monopolies and collusion (HCMC).
In a May 9 news announcement, the DOC said the HCMC “will guide the division’s enforcement strategy and policy approach in health care, including by facilitating policy advocacy, investigations and, where warranted, civil and criminal enforcement in health-care markets.”
“Every year, Americans spend trillions of dollars on health care, money that is increasingly being gobbled up by a small number of payers, providers and dominant intermediaries that have consolidated their way to power in communities across the country,” Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the Justice Department’s antitrust division said in the announcement. “Led by Katrina Rouse, the task force will identify and root out monopolies and collusive practices that increase costs, decrease quality and create single points of failure in the health-care industry.”
NCPA CEO: Task force is ‘long overdue’
“This is a very encouraging development and it’s long overdue,” said B. Douglas Hoey, CEO of the NCPA. “The PBM [pharmacy benefit managers]/insurance conglomerates are among the most aggressive, ruthless, and predatory corporate actors in the entire economy.”
Hoey further described the effects those “insurance conglomerates” are having on pharmacies and patients.
“The largest corporate pharmacy in the world owns the largest PBM in the world,” Hoey said. “The other large PBMs are owned by, or entangled with, some of the largest insurance companies in the world. These corporate Frankenstein monsters use their size and leverage to starve community pharmacies by often paying them less than what the pharmacy pays for the medicine, and steering community pharmacies’ patients into their own retail pharmacies or their own mail-order and specialty pharmacies. These anti-competitive business practices are leading to reduced access to care for patients and higher prescription costs.”
HCMC to respond to consumer, professional complaints
The DOJ announcement said the new task force “will consider widespread competition concerns shared by patients, health-care professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs, including issues regarding payer-provider consolidation, serial acquisitions, labor and quality of care, medical billing, health-care IT services, access to misuse of health-care data and more.”
The task force will be composed of civil and criminal prosecutors, economists, health-care industry experts, technologists, data scientists, investigators, and policy advisors “to identify and address pressing antitrust problems in health-care markets,” the DOJ said.
Veteran antitrust prosecutor Katrina Rouse will direct the HCMC.
“We are grateful to Assistant Attorney General Kanter for this initiative, and we are more than happy to cooperate in any way we can,” Hoey said. “Industry data shows that independent pharmacies are closing at a rate of roughly one per day. Americans are losing their most trusted and most accessible health care providers, and it’s mostly because of the unfair practices of the PBM/insurance cartels.”
