the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jul 22, 2024
Healthcare conglomerates, including CVS Health, UnitedHealth and Cigna, swindle patients by inflating prices of prescription drugs to mind-boggling levels, according to a recent report by the Federal Trade Commission.
For example, a generic drug, Gleevec, which is used to treat a blood cancer, costs only $97 to a patient at Costco. But this drug’s price skyrockets to $9,000 at Walgreens and reaches a mind-boggling $19,200 from a home delivery company.
These price jumps are engineered by a complicated network of health insurance companies, middlemen (known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs), and pharmacies that are owned and controlled by just three healthcare conglomerates nationwide, CVS Health, UnitedHealth and Cigna. Together, these three companies control 80% of all the prescriptions filled in the U.S., which brings them over one trillion dollars in sales every year. This massively high revenue makes these conglomerates among the biggest and the richest companies in the world.
Because of such market domination, these healthcare conglomerates steer patients to their own pharmacies and mail order companies. If you are insured by Aetna, which is owned by CVS Health, your pharmacy will certainly be CVS. Insurer Cigna owns a mail-order drug company and pharmacy benefit manager, Express Scripts. UnitedHealth’s mail-order drug company is Optum Home.
So, the three healthcare conglomerates don’t give their customers any choice but to buy the drugs at a wildly inflated cost from the companies in their own networks.
These companies are only in business to increase their sales, profits and control. Our health is another opportunity for them to extract ever more money for themselves.