Who Runs My Drug Plan?

The real issue in pharmaceuticals used to treat mental illness is the business practices that looms as an obstacle between the psychiatrist prescribing the medication and the patient who wants to receive the medication.  I have posted about the managed care practices - specifically pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that get in between physicians and patients. That previous post shows a diagram from an internal memo that reveals some perspective on the PBM attitude.  The goal for them is to come up with a business argument that will either improve profits for the managed care company or justify the billions of dollars in costs that PBMs add to the health care system every year.

The National Community Pharmacists Association fights back against PBMs from this web site.  A lot of what you find is relevant for pharmacists also applies to physicians - especially wasting physician time, indirectly affecting reimbursement, and disrupting the patient-physician relationship by dictating medications that need to be prescribed that are financially advantageous to the PBM.

Some of the details provided on this site are very interesting.  One example is a $10 price spread on up to 4 billion prescriptions per year.  I once read that PBMs made up an $80 billion per year industry and it is easy to see how they can get there.  In fact, the volume strategies that they use are very similar to the financial services industry.  In both cases, political advantage has added businesses that levy another tax on consumers and do not provide any added efficiency.  It is easy to see how managed care strategies fail to contain health care inflation when the intermediaries with government advantages are set up to maximize profits and waste the time of physicians and pharmacists.  

If you are a physician, watch the "Fed Up With Phil" video and ask yourself if it isn't time to get rid of health care middlemen that are increasing costs and in many cases detracting from the quality of health care?  If you are a physician, isn't it time that you or your professional organization starting putting up web sites like this one to educate the public about managed care and all of its problems?  Isn't it time that we stopped wasting our time and money with politicians?

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA