Last week, I wrote about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which are the companies that insurers contract with to help them create and manage their drug formularies. These PBMs also have significant power in the market as the ones who, to a fair extent, influence which prescriptions patients get because they control the patient’s copay for each medicine, so they take advantage of that by getting kickbacks from manufacturers to make those manufacturers’ drugs cheaper for patients.
And now PBMs come into play again this week as we look at GoodRx. The most useful source I found when reading about GoodRx is right on the company’s website, an FAQ for pharmacy staff. Also, this review of their public filings was very helpful.
First, what is GoodRx? It’s a company that offers a free prescription card that patients can use to get discounts on their medications, and you can check what the discounted price will be at pharmacies in your area. (They’ve since branched out now into subscription programs and telehealth, but I’ll focus on their original line of business here.) GoodRx prescription discount cards don’t work in addition to insurance; rather, you either buy the medication through your insurance plan or you pay without insurance and use a GoodRx card to get a better price.
I have no financial interest in GoodRx, but it seems like a no-brainer for anyone who is about to buy a medication through insurance to ask how much their copay will be and then pull up the GoodRx app right then and there to see if any local pharmacies can offer the med cheaper through GoodRx (and, according to a couple journalists who tried that, they got a cheaper price through GoodRx about 40% of the time for the most commonly prescribed medications). Just remember though that the money spent on medications when using GoodRx does not count toward your deductible.
It makes sense that there would be a website/app that lists the prices of medications at multiple pharmacies so patients can price shop, but what’s with these discount card prices being lower than the cash prices?
Pharmacies, in their contracts with PBMs, will not get paid more than their list price. So, to avoid missing out on money that PBMs would be perfectly willing to pay them, they make sure to set their list price (i.e., cash price) higher than what any contracted price with a PBM will be. So you should expect cash prices to always be higher than the price you’ll get by going through your insurer, although I’m sure this rule is broken sometimes. Because it’s American healthcare.
On the GoodRx website/app, the prices shown are not cash prices though. They’re the actual prices that pharmacies have contracted with PBMs. These prices vary significantly from pharmacy-PBM contract to pharmacy-PBM contract, mostly because of the complexity and sheer number of different medications that they are negotiating over, which means they cannot possibly negotiate over every individual medication, so instead they negotiate over groups of medications. This means some medications in that group will end up being cheaper than they would otherwise be, and others in that group will end up being more expensive.
This is summed up nicely in a quote by GoodRx co-founder, Doug Hirsch: “We said, let’s see if we can gather all these prices and see if we can exploit the variation in these contracts.”
But this means pharmacies are stuck selling medications to tons of people at prices that they accidentally undervalued in a negotiation with a single PBM. Sure, short of adding a gag clause to their contract, they can’t stop the PBM from sharing that price with GoodRx, but why in the world would pharmacies ever agree to let tons of other patients not even covered by that PBM walk out with a medicine for that same undervalued price?
They actually don’t have a choice. PBMs require in their contracts with pharmacies to accept the GoodRx discount card price. GoodRx does try to make pharmacies feel better about it by saying that “once patients are in the pharmacy, they are also more likely to purchase non-prescription items at the store.” Ok great, so the medication turns into a forced loss leader.
There’s one more big piece to this puzzle. Why would PBMs go along with GoodRx in the first place? Think about it from their perspective. They are angering pharmacies by forcing acceptance of GoodRx as part of their contracts, and they are the ones sharing all their contracted prices with GoodRx and then left looking bad after patients find out their PBM didn’t get the best negotiated price on a large minority of medications. In short, what’s in it for the PBMs?
Money. I suspect the PBM is getting a cut of every transaction that uses GoodRx because the PBM is the one adjudicating the claim. They’re also giving a cut of it to GoodRx as a reward for bringing them the extra claim.
PBMs and GoodRx both seem to win, as do patients if they’re finding lower prices. So if GoodRx is actually decreasing prescription spending, where is the money coming from? There’s only one party left. Pharmacies must be the ones taking the loss. I wonder if that loss-leader argument actually makes pharmacies more than they are losing on this whole venture. My suspicion is that it’s hard to prove one way or the other, but I doubt it.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 