Bruce Japsen has written about healthcare business and policy for three decades. He has covered the rise, fall and rise again of health reform, chronicling trends that include the influence of Bill and Hillary Clinton to Barack and Michelle Obama from Chicago where he's based.
The much-anticipated launch of Blue Shield of California’s drug benefit venture with Amazon Pharmacy and the pharmacy benefit manager Abarca will debut in January, executives involved say., it sent the stocks of the nation’s largest managers of pharmacy benefits plummeting when Blue Shield confirmed it was dropping CVS Health’s Caremark pharmacy benefit manager and going its own way.
“Our benefits translate down to patients,” Abarca chief executive Jason Borschow told more than 250 attendees at the Forbes Healthcare Summit at NYU Langone Health in New York. “We don’t want any more conflicts.” PBMs are considered middlemen between drug companies and consumers when it comes to purchasing prescription medicines. But the PBM's role has been under fire in recent years as the public, taxpayers and Congress question whether they are passing along as much savings as they should to health plan enrollees.
The top three ranked PBMs by “total equivalent prescription claims managed” last year in the U.S. market share were: CVS Health’s Caremark PBM ; Cigna and Evernorth’s Express Scripts PBM and UnitedHealth Group’s OptumRx But Abarca and Amazon Pharmacy executives stressed at the Forbes Healthcare Summit that they will be competitive with rivals and customers of the Pharmacy Care Reimagined venture will be satisfied.
"Our collaboration with Blue Shield of California aims to make medication management simpler and more affordable for patients,” said Dr. Vin Gupta, chief medical officer of Amazon Pharmacy. “By offering home delivery from Amazon Pharmacy, we're not just saving patients a trip to the pharmacy, we're supporting better health outcomes by making it easier for people to conveniently and consistently take their prescribed medications.
Abarca Blue Shield Of California Pbms CVS Health Caremark
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