A Brief History of Pharmacy Benefit Managers (How They Became the “Shady Middle Men” in the Drug Market)

July 19, 2021

This is a guest post by Taylor J. Christensen, M.D. (@taylorjayc). Dr. Christensen is an internal medicine physician and health policy researcher with a background in business strategy and health services research.

Since any mystery in the healthcare system intrigues me, I’ve been working on understanding pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) lately.

Why did PBMs arise in the first place, and how did they come to have this somewhat strange role in the drug market? Let’s look at the evolution of PBMs, which I will categorize into three distinct phases.

Forewarning: There isn’t a lot of publicly available information on this stuff, so some of this is my best piecing together of things I’ve read plus supplemented by direct communications with people who work for insurers or PBMs.

 

Read the source article at theincidentaleconomist.com
2021-07-14 00:09:37

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