, Columnist
Meet the Middlemen Cutting Drug Prices
Savings can be significant, but patients don't get all the benefit.
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For all the uproar over U.S. drug pricing, you wouldn’t expect to hear that drug spending slowed for many last year. A big reason? An increasingly powerful group of medication middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which negotiate drug prices on behalf of insurers, employers and the government.
But their services carry high costs of a different sort, including fewer drug options for patients.