PBMs survived their first day of congressional grilling

The oft-maligned middlemen of the drug industry, thrown under the bus by their counterparts in manufacturing, escaped anything resembling a reckoning when they were hauled before Congress yesterday.

As STAT’s Nicholas Florko reports, executives for the country’s five largest pharmacy benefit managers mostly parried the probing questions of the Senate Finance Committee. There were threats of legislation that would increase transparency in drug pricing, but nothing that will have PBMs living in any substantial fear.

The hearing painted a tonal contrast with a February meeting in which the same committee was quite a bit harsher on drug manufacturers, but PBMs aren’t off the hook yet. Today, executives from CVS, OptumRx, and Express Scripts will appear before a House subcommittee investigating “the rising cost of insulin.”

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