Sarah Huckabee Sanders: My State Is Taking On the Middlemen Who Inflate Drug Prices
The New York Times, June 10, 2025
Behind inflated prescription prices, complicated insurance plans and dying local pharmacies, there is a little-known culprit: pharmacy benefit managers that operate as self-serving middlemen between drug manufacturers, insurance companies and you. Now my home state, Arkansas, is taking action against them.
I am proud to be the first governor in the country to ban the anticompetitive practices that allow P.B.M.s to dominate the prescription drug market, and to encourage other states and Congress to follow Arkansas’s lead…
The legislation I just signed makes it so that a P.B.M. cannot also own a pharmacy. … [end quote]
President Trump has also issued an executive order which states, “The Secretary of Health and Human Services will establish a mechanism through which American patients can buy their drugs directly from manufacturers who sell to Americans at a “Most-Favored-Nation” price, bypassing middlemen.” The PBMs are the middlemen.
Savvy METARs know to compare all insurance company prescription pricing with GoodRX, BlinkHealth, Amazon and Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Pharmacy. I also look at Canada Pharmacy Online.
But the fact remains that millions of Americans get their drugs via PBMs. The stocks of CVS and Cigna (Express Scripts) do not seem to be strongly affected by these attacks. They will of course fight any adverse orders in court. Not to mention that it would probably take years to develop a government bureaucracy that would replace the PBMs.
Wendy