Pharmacy benefit managers – Clear Thinking on Healthcare

PBMs Are Using the Same Strategy as Credit Card Companies

Do you know how credit card companies can give you 2% or more cash back? They charge merchants 1-3% processing fees! Plus they earn interest when people carry credit card debt.

Why do merchants put up with these 1-3% fees? Because the credit card companies provide them with a valuable service. It makes getting payments from people easier, especially in the days of fewer people carrying cash. This expands their sales and more than makes up for the 1-3% fees they’re being charged by the credit card companies, although they’d rather not get charged such high fees, especially when many companies’ profits are not much more than 3%.

This is a tricky game the credit card companies are playing. They’ve found that to get more people to use their cards, they need to give rewards like cash back. And there’s this delicate balance created. They want to get the most people using their cards by offering the most generous rewards, but they can’t charge merchants too much to fund those rewards or else merchants will stop accepting those cards. Except that the biggest credit card companies are too important to stop accepting, so they can get away with charging even higher fees. It rewards size. The bigger companies are rewarded with even more market share. It tends toward monopoly, or at least oligopoly, which means the middle men will be empowered to take an even larger share of the total price paid.would make their cards’ usefulness lower and maybe not worth the more generous rewards.

Let’s look at what is happening in the market in aggregate. Merchants, to cover the added expense of high credit card fees, end up charging higher prices. And then the credit card companies are passing some of that money on to the consumer. It’s all because credit card companies are creatively finding ways to leverage their market power to win more customers.

Wouldn’t this all be simpler if credit card companies couldn’t give rewards? Then consumers would be faced with true prices from merchants rather than having to guess at the net price of things after accounting for rewards, and they’d probably lose less of the total price to extra profits for the middle men. With decreased complexity comes greater market transparency, which makes hiding extra profits in the shadows of complexity much more difficult.

Can you see how this is exactly the role pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) play? They’re a middle man that gets the drug manufacturer to give them a bunch of money (“rebates”), and then they pass a portion of it on to the insurer in an attempt to win as many insurer contracts as possible. Instead of simply competing by offering the best service and charging reasonable fees to win insurer contracts, they’ve expanded into these strange (but ingenious) complexity-increasing strategies. I described the evolution of PBMs into this complicated middle man position here.

In business school, I didn’t learn about this middle man game of leveraging market power to take extra money from suppliers and pass some of it directly on to their customers. Maybe this is a well-understood phenomenon and there’s a term for it and I just have been unaware. But whatever we call it, I don’t like it because of the additional complexity it creates and how it rewards size with even more size (tending toward fewer market competitors). I haven’t noticed any other examples of this, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone has one.

How Pharmacy Benefit Managers Are Getting Away with More than They Should (And a Solution?)

Ok I’ve got a couple more posts I wrote on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to complete my efforts to work through what they are and how they work . . .

What do you think to yourself when you are at the supermarket and you see a toddler throwing a tantrum—clearly because he wants a chocolate bar—and then the mom, exasperated and embarrassed, finally agrees to buy him one just to shut him up?

Do you think, “What a bratty child! I’m glad she finally got him to be quiet.”

Or do you (correctly) think, “I can’t believe she just gave in to that! She’s teaching him that if he wants something, he should throw a tantrum until he gets it. That’s probably why he still throws tantrums.”

This child’s behavior makes sense. Not that it’s desirable behaviour! But you have to give him credit for rationally responding to bad incentives–he’s found a way to get what he wants, and he’s leveraging that.

Applying this to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), they definitely have some undesirable behaviours, but they also have bad incentives. I’m not here to be a PBM apologist, but I’m also not here to misdiagnose the source of the issues. If we understand the incentives and then work to get them changed, the behaviours will change accordingly.

So, how are we giving PBMs the proverbial chocolate bar?

The normal incentive of a business is to maximize profit. In a well-functioning market, businesses achieve that by delivering better value (Value = Quality / Price) to customers than their competitors. Problems arise when customers are unable to determine the value of their various options. This is where the bad behaviour sneaks in: the company can get away with charging more or delivering less than a well-functioning market would dictate, and the customers don’t know.

In a prior post, I talked a little bit about how the PBM market is competitive as long as insurers have enough knowledge and expertise at their disposal to accurately identify the true quality and cost of their PBM options. My guess is that insurers often do not have this knowledge and expertise at their disposal, either in house or by not contracting with a consultant who really knows their stuff. Or maybe sometimes the issue is that insurers remain with a PBM for too long, so they are no longer getting a competitive deal. Either way, it leads to insurers (i.e., the customers) not being actively aware of the value of their various options, and PBMs are acting accordingly.

Example: A friend of mine used to run a private health insurance company, and he told me they were getting 5% of rebates from their PBM. He asked for more, and the PBM responded by giving him double! There was lots more on the table apparently.

Another example: An auditor frequently hired by insurers to audit their PBMs’ performance said that, in more than 400 audits, “we have never found a single situation where something wasn’t wrong.”

How bad are PBMs acting? Or, in other words, how much are they taking advantage of this contracting complexity/lack of transparency?

You would expect it to show up in their profits. The trouble is, PBM profitability is incredibly difficult to ascertain. But here’s an elegant visual estimation of how many dollars each link in the supply chain takes from a $100 drug expenditure. PBMs are estimated to account for about $7 of those $100. I think the important point isn’t the amount so much as that $7 is more than it could be.

In summary, insurers often are not getting the best deals from PBMs. The business relationship with their PBM is governed by an incredibly complex contract, and this complexity leads to insurers not knowing what they are leaving on the table. So PBMs surreptitiously scoop it off the table and into their pockets. They are responding totally rationally to bad incentives.

In my mind, the implied solution here is either to (1) legislate/standardize these insurer-PBM contracts so that they’re simpler or (2) encourage insurers to be much more proactive about making sure they’re getting the best deal possible from their PBM (which would probably cost a lot of money in consulting fees or in developing that knowledge in house).

One more related point: When insurers have medical loss ratio policies governing how much money they have to spend on care vs. non-care expenses (the “medical loss” is the amount of premiums received that they spend on care for patients), they are going to be less aggressive in trying to pursue cost containment, which would include worrying less about the excess money going to their PBM.

Is the pharmacy benefit manager market competitive?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

This last week, I spoke with someone who works at an insurer. When I asked if it’s relatively easy for them to identify the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) that’s offering the best deal, they said that it is, with caveats.

Quick sidenote: I’m finding kind people to answer my probing questions about PBMs, but I’ve also faced a fair amount of hesitancy in general. I think it’s because they worry what is going to happen with the information they are giving. I’m committed to being as transparent and unbiased as possible about the information I receive, and I’m equally committed to not disclosing any of my sources. So I guess that means I cannot prove the reliability of the information I’m sharing, but it’s worth it as long as I maintain access to good sources to help me understand this stuff!

Remember that for a market to be competitive it needs (1) multiple competitors, (2) the customers need to be able to identify the value (price and quality) of each competitor, and (3) the customers need incentives to choose the highest-value option.

The PBM market fulfills all these criteria pretty well. There are plenty of competitors (three big ones, several midsize ones, and lots of smaller ones). So, when an insurer submits a request for proposal (RFP), they will get multiple offers. Identifying the value of the proposals received is doable, if a bit tricky, as discussed below. And the insurer has incentives to choose the highest-value option–getting a great comprehensive formulary with the desirable meds makes for happy members, and lowering the costs goes to their bottom line (assuming there are no annoying medical loss requirement issues).

Let’s talk about the challenges that come into play when they try to identify the highest-value option. It’s actually pretty straightforward–these are incredibly complex contracts, to the point that regular healthcare consultants are not deeply specialized enough. And PBMs leverage that by trying to define things in ways that save them money. To the extent that, if an insurer wants to identify the best PBM proposal, they will probably need a consultant that specializes in helping insurers contract with PBMs. They need the help of someone who knows all the PBMs’ tricks.

I won’t even get into all the complexities of those contracts, partly because I don’t know many of them and partly because those details don’t change the big-picture incentives I’m talking about.

But the good news is that, with the right knowledge/assistance, insurers are able to make value-sensitive decisions in the PBM market! In fact, apparently many insurers submit an RFP every few years to make sure what they’re getting from their current PBM is still competitive, otherwise they’re probably leaving money on the table.

So, that’s one question answered. More to come.

Transitioning to Value Instead of Volume in the Drug Market?

In response to some of my recent posts on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), as well as my overall interest lately in understanding the drug market better, someone asked what a value-based PBM would look like. Interesting question!

When analyzing healthcare from a “value versus volume” perspective, realizing exactly what we mean by that is an important starting point.

Consider what we mean when we say that healthcare providers are “rewarded for volume.” This is usually interpreted to mean healthcare providers are paid in a fee-for-service way–they deliver a service, they get paid. Which means they make more money when they deliver more services, so the incentive is to deliver as many services as possible.

And when we say that providers are “rewarded for value,” this is usually referring to some form of capitation, which means they get paid per head (that’s where the capit part of capitation comes from). In other words, providers would, for example, get paid a monthly fee for every patient whose care they are responsible for. Which means they make more money when they deliver fewer services (which, theoretically, happens when they are doing the right things to prevent their patients from getting sick).

These two methods of reimbursement are seen as “good” and “bad.” Capitation and its variations have good incentives (to prevent illness) and fee for service has bad incentives.

But they’re not opposites, like two sides of a coin or something. They are actually two different ends of a single spectrum. That spectrum is the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum. (I should come up with a better name for it.)

At one end of the spectrum, you have people buying very narrowly defined things. Like if a hospital really did send you a bill for every single nursing task and bandage and bag of saline and tablet of acetaminophen you received while you were there. This is the essence of fee for service–buying narrowly defined things. A doctor visit here, a procedure there.

The other end of the spectrum is buying very broadly defined things. Like paying a healthcare organization an annual fee for covering every single healthcare need that you could possibly have during that year, all inclusive. Every surgery and cancer treatment and emergency department visit etc. would be included.

I’ve written about all this before (way back in 2013!), but the way to figure out where on the spectrum the service should sit (i.e., how broadly defined the product/service should be) is to think about it from the patient’s perspective to see what “job” they want done that it’s fulfilling for them.

The easy example is if someone needs a hip replacement, let’s say they’ve tried all the conservative measures and now their job is simply to get their hip replaced and then recover/rehab from that. So why would they pay separately for the surgeon’s time, the OR time, the anesthesiologist’s time, the medications administered, the hardware used, the physical therapy appointments, the pre-op and post-op appointments, etc., when they could just pay a single lump sum to get their job fulfilled?

When we buy a plane ticket, we don’t pay a separate bill for the airplane depreciation, the fuel, the pilot’s time, the flight attendant’s time, the snack, etc., right? No, we just pay for the single plane ticket that includes all the products and services that go into getting us from point A to point B.

Using that principle of identifying the job to be done and then defining the service as broadly as is necessary to allow the patient to pay a single price for getting that job fulfilled will allow anyone to determine where on the “breadth of products/services sold as a single unit” spectrum anything in the world should sit.

So what about the drug market?

Much of the time, we know pretty well how long we’ll be on a medication. If it’s an asthma med, such as an inhaled corticosteroid, usually the patient will be on it for years or decades, so just knowing how much it costs per month is probably the right breadth of services.

Or, if it’s not a chronic medication, such as a cure for hepatitis C, figuring out the total cost of your direct-acting antiviral regimen is pretty easy if you at least know how much each pill will cost you and how many days (weeks) your treatment course will last.

My point is that the drug market, even though you’re typically buying either a short course of pills or a monthly allotment of them, is already “value based” because the breadth of products is attuned to the job you have for the medication (“keep my asthma at bay for 1 month,” or, “cure my hepatitis C”).

How do PBMs fit into all this?

Well, they’re middlemen. As far as I can tell, even though they’re the ones making the formularies, they aren’t really doing anything to actively shift the breadth of products sold one way or another, which is good because it already seems to be sitting on the spectrum in a good place.

Is there a role for including medications in capitated arrangements so that patients’ diabetes and hypertension and heart failure meds are all included in their annual or monthly fee? I guess that’s possible–it would encourage providers to choose cheaper meds, and it would decrease financially motivated medication nonadherence. So maybe PBMs would be involved in coordinating those efforts.

Ultimately, the big improvements that will change the drug market aren’t so much going to come from optimizations in the volume versus value space, but rather they will come from increasing competition and value-sensitive decisions. And maybe from limiting the degree to which PBMs distort the market? But I’m still figuring that one out.

Maybe This Is How PBMs Started Getting Kickbacks?

In case you haven’t been following all the riveting posts I’ve been writing lately about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), here are the main ones:

Pharmacy Benefit Managers: Kind of a Mystery to Me

I’m Still Confused by PBMs But Trying to Fix That

Why Does GoodRx Exist, and How Does It Work

In the “I’m still Confused by PBMs” article, I went through the step by step process of PBMs coming into existence, which they did by filling a need in the market for companies to help consumers pay the correct copay right up front when they buy a medicine.

This time, I want to think more about how they went from that simple software solution (integrating an insurer’s formulary into the pharmacy’s software system so that it can spit out the right out-of-pocket price on the cash register when a patient buys a medicine) to being seen by many as the “shady middlemen.”

The starting point is the position they found themselves in the market. They were responsible for creating formularies for several different insurers. Their goal, assuming the PBM industry is competitive, is to help insurers have the most generous formulary for the cheapest.

I bet at some point, some young upstart working for a PBM had an idea . . .

Young upstart: “If we want to offer a cheaper formulary than our competitor, why don’t we try to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers to lower the costs of the drugs?”

Old manager, feeling superior: “But how are we going to do that? You don’t understand that drug manufacturers only negotiate with pharmacy wholesalers. The wholesalers are the only party to which manufacturers sell their drugs. Nobody else buys directly from the manufacturers, so no one else can negotiate with manufacturers.” And then, with a taunting eyebrow raise, “Unless you are suggesting something radical, like that we start backward integrating to act as drug wholesalers as well?”

Young upstart, undaunted: “Not at all. How about this. Why don’t we pay a visit to a drug manufacturer that is selling a medication that has several competitors in the same drug category and make them an offer they can’t refuse. We could tell them we’ll put their medication in the lowest copay tier and all the other medications in that same category will still be in the middle copay tier. They will sell way more of their medicine and make a lot more money. But, in return, they have to pay us a “rebate” for every transaction of their medication that we process. They still make more money because they’re selling so much more of their medication, and we get some of it.”

Old manager, interest piqued: “And how is this going to allow us to offer a cheaper formulary than our competitors?”

Young upstart, gaining momentum: “We’ll simply charge less for insurers to use our formulary. Sure, they’ll have to pay a slightly larger share of the total cost of that specific medicine, but the lower price we offer them will more than make up for that. And the best part is, everyone wins! The drug manufacturer wins by increasing profit, the patient wins by paying a lower copay, the insurer wins by getting a cheaper overall formulary, and we win because we keep some of the rebate!”

Old manager, ever skeptical: “If everyone wins, then where is the money coming from?”

Young upstart: “The money comes from the other drug manufacturers, whose market share goes down. That profit that they’re losing is being divvied up among (1) us, (2) the drug manufacturer we’re contracting with, and (3) the insurers using our cheaper formularies, some of which will be passed on to patients.”

Old manager: “Ok, that makes sense, but this sounds too good to be true. You haven’t mentioned pharmacies yet–how would this impact them?”

Young upstart: “I was hoping you’d ask. This won’t impact pharmacies at all. They won’t even know about this transaction between us and the drug manufacturer. As far as they’re concerned, all they see is that they’re still getting paid the negotiated price for the medication, it’s just that patients are paying less and the insurer is paying more.”

Old manager, nodding: “So the patient pays less but the insurer pays more. Yet the insurer is saving money overall because our formulary is cheaper enough to more than compensate for that.”

Young upstart: “Exactly.”

And that is what I imagine to be the start of PBMs negotiating “kickbacks” with drug manufacturers. It was all in the name of PBMs being able to offer lower-priced formularies to insurers by orchestrating a way to help some drug manufacturers sell more drugs and get rebates/kickbacks/volume discounts in return.

This surely boosted the profitability of the PBMs that started doing it, which, when others heard about it, started doing the same thing.

Eventually, every drug manufacturer started paying some kind of rebate to PBMs, which means it became a zero sum endeavor overall for manufacturers because the net effect of having a higher market share through a specific PBM but a lower market through the others that made deals with their competitors means that they end up with essentially the same market share, the only difference being that now they are paying money to PBMs to avoid losing that market share.

Shady middlemen indeed. But I can’t blame them for doing it–this is what capitalism and competition is all about. It’s just a market failure that this specific strategy turns out to be a cost-increaser in the market.

I’m Still Confused by PBMs But Trying to Fix That

Last week was the first week in a long time that I haven’t had a Tuesday blog post. Sometimes life happens, and that’s ok. My interest and passion for fixing healthcare continues unabated.

Every time I try to remember the important details about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) since writing about them a couple months ago, I have to go back to that post and re-read it. This is annoying to me, and it’s a hint that I haven’t grasped them well enough yet. So this post is me trying to process PBMs more thoroughly.

I haven’t yet talked to anyone who works at a PBM (working on that–let me know if any of you readers have any contacts at one!), but pending that additional information, here is what I understand based on all my research.

But first, a meta thought.

Maybe you haven’t noticed in my writings, but I try to describe the problem needing a solution before I discuss that solution. When a solution is presented in the context of a clear explanation of the problem that preceded it, the solution becomes intuitive why it was created rather than coming across as “interesting and comprehensible yet still kind of a mystery as to its purpose or how it fits into the bigger picture.”

For example, before I explain something like bundled payments, I need to clarify the ways that healthcare stupidly separates out so many things that should really be seen as a single job and how that separation of jobs interferes with people being able to compare prices to make value-sensitive decisions.

I believe most healthcare writers fail to coherently explain the problem before they start describing reforms, and it makes healthcare seem way more complicated than it is.

So, what is the context that created a need for PBMs? My understanding is this . . .

When a patient buys a prescription, the price of that medication is the result of a negotiation between the pharmacy and the insurer (unless, of course, the pharmacy and insurer have no agreement, in which case the total price is whatever the pharmacy has set it at). And that negotiated price gets split into two–the patient pays part and the insurer pays part.

At some point along the way, pharmacies and insurers must have decided that it’s undesirable for patients to pay the full price up front and also it’s undesirable for insurers to pay the full price up front.

Think about it. Patients would hate having to pay the full price up front and then get some of that reimbursed by their insurer weeks later. And patients would also hate to pay nothing up front only to get a bill from their insurer weeks later asking them to pay some crazy amount they never would have agreed to. Additionally, either one of those scenarios would create a post-transaction reconciliation nightmare.

The obvious solution would be to get pharmacies to charge patients the correct copayment right up front.

This would require insurers’ formularies and copayment policies to somehow get integrated into pharmacies’ software systems to calculate the price for the patient right then and there when they ring up the medication. This cannot possibly be a straightforward process, especially when miscalculations can cause people to lose tons of money and get very angry. Maybe large insurers have the resources to hire the right people and build the right process knowledge and software, but wouldn’t it be great if companies existed to do this sort of thing for them so they could focus on their core business?

Suddenly, hiring a separate company–let’s call it a “pharmacy benefit manager”–to do this for them makes a whole lot of sense.

Better yet, a large insurer, acting as an entrepreneur, could see this need in the market and create a spin-off subsidiary that could do that job for them and also do that job for a bunch of other smaller insurers. Boost that revenue, right?

Okay, that helped me to process many of the steps I’d skipped the first time I tried processing this topic. I tried to cover too much ground before. I will continue spending a little more time on these topics. I pity the fool who doesn’t find all of this fascinating!

Pharmacy Benefit Managers: Kind of a Mystery to Me

Let’s see if I can make sense of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the companies that seem to have a reputation as shady price-increasing middlemen in prescription drugs. This is part of my effort to better understand prescription drug prices and what’s wrong with that market.

First, consider the flow of a medicine from start to end.

The obvious start is that drug manufacturers make the medicine. And then that medicine has to get to pharmacies. Pharmacies do not want to contract with every single drug manufacturer directly, so instead they use wholesalers, who do that contracting for them and buy the drugs from the manufacturers and store them, and then those wholesalers are able to quickly supply all the drugs a pharmacy could want for a small markup. I don’t know the details on whether pharmacies can shop around for the best deal on a drug from different wholesalers or if they just contract with a single one, but, regardless, now the pharmacy has its drugs, and this part of the supply chain seems to work properly.

Next, the patient. They buy the drugs from the pharmacy. If they’re going through insurance, the pharmacy inputs into their computer the medication details and the patient’s insurance information and then out of the black box comes an out-of-pocket price for the patient to pay to obtain the medication and a price for the insurer to pay (and that bill gets sent directly to the insurer). That’s the end of the line for the medicine.

But the tricky part is that final transaction, how the prices are determined in that black box. This is where the mystery and intrigue and confusion come in.

Let’s talk about PBMs.

Originally, the precursors of today’s PBMs were simply companies that helped insurers process medication claims after patients would buy them. I’m not sure exactly how they morphed into today’s version of a PBM, but based on what I’ve been reading, my guess is that it went something like this . . .

Insurers (especially smaller self-insured employers) wanted someone with expertise in all things medications to create a formulary for them–surely a very complicated process–and since these precursor PBMs were already processing all the drug claims anyway, they were an obvious choice to ask to take on the new role of creating and managing formularies.

Next, since these precursor PBMs were now making formularies for several different insurers, they inadvertently had amassed significant power over many patients’ out-of-pocket prescription prices (and, therefore, patients’ prescription choices). So when drug prices started to climb higher, these precursor PBMs wanted to stay competitive and offer formularies with all the best medicines for the cheapest, so they got into the game of negotiating directly with drug manufacturers. And that is probably the point where they became modern-day PBMs. The three PBMs with the largest market share today are Express Scripts, CVS CareMark, and UnitedHealth’s OptumRx

But if the drug manufacturer is selling their drugs to pharmacies via wholesalers, what are PBMs and drug manufacturer negotiating over?

Kickbacks for PBMs to get more patients to buy their medications. That’s really what it boils down to. Although the payments from drug manufacturers to PBMs can take various forms, the simplest one is that the drug manufacturer pays a PBM a nice sum for the PBM to include their drugs on the PBM’s formulary. The PBM then passes some of this money on to the patients by lowering their copay for those drugs.

There are a lot of hidden details in these PBM-drug manufacturer negotiations. It’s an area rife with hidden numbers. The main question is, How much do PBMs actually get paid (including all the different forms of kickbacks) from the drug manufacturers? Nobody knows. There have been government attempts to force them to disclose this, but the laws only require them to report on certain kickbacks, and it’s probably not too difficult for them to look really good by shifting the majority of their kickbacks to different categories that are not reported.

My other question is, How do insurers choose a PBM? This should be a fairly answerable question with the right contacts. Is this a fairly transparent market, where insurers can go to each PBM and ask how much the total cost will be of the drugs their patients will get, plus the fees paid to the PBM? Based on the sheer complexity and number of variables involved, I doubt the PBM selection is easy and transparent. This means PBMs can get away with not only hiding how much they are getting paid by drug manufacturers, but also not passing much of that money on to the patients and insurers. And nobody will ever know truly how much these middlemen are adding to our skyrocketing drug prices.

Why Does GoodRx Exist, and How Does It Work

Stacks of GoodRx cards sent to me at my place of employment

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.

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