The North Carolina legislature will enter its 2023 session in January and could consider policies to address health care costs. But as we often see, “solutions” that rely on government intervention are often misplaced, resulting in price controls and over-regulation that distort healthcare markets. Free market competition, not government interference, is the best solution for lowering prices in healthcare and other industries.
Health care costs are nothing new. Failed experiments show time and time again that government intervention in private sector agreements in health care yields no good results. But private sector solutions already exist. Currently, over 65 pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are 266 One million Americans have health insurance through employers, unions, state governments, insurance companies, and other organizations. This number continues to grow as inflation and rising costs make the savings and efficiencies offered by PBMs increasingly important.Studies have shown that when PBM is restricted, patients, on average, $962 every year.
PBM creates a network of pharmacies and formularies to help patients stay on top of their prescriptions, operates specialty pharmacies, offers home delivery options, and conducts audits to reduce drug cost inflation. It provides value by preventing and preventing fraud. PBM also negotiates with large pharmaceutical companies that set drug prices to prevent rising costs for PBM customers. Employers, including small businesses, seeking to provide competitive healthcare benefits to their employees and their families, are choosing to use her PBM for the many benefits and inherent cost savings. increase.
However, employer pharmacies, such as imposing price requirements, pursuing rate regulation, interfering with private contracts, or restricting options to help employers have more choice and access affordable drug coverage Further restrictions on benefits limit the ability of employers to provide effective benefits for their employees. This leads to higher business costs and higher patient costs. Government intervention in these private sector contractual agreements would make it difficult to do business in North Carolina and would give government bureaucrats control over patient care. This will only hurt patients, families and taxpayers. The North Carolina Legislature should avoid this approach.
The federal government has also made efforts to disrupt the private sector healthcare market and the success of PBM. S.4293The Pharmacy Benefit Manager Transparency Act of 2022 would have imposed price controls and unnecessary regulations on Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) that would have increased rather than reduced drug costs, hurting patients and families. . Fortunately, the bill was not passed by either the Senate or the House. Efforts to control private sector negotiations for PBM move power away from patients and into the hands of governments. Any kind of price control reduces competition and results in higher costs for everyone.
As legislators begin a new session, they should remember their promise to make government more efficient and less intrusive and to protect the voters they serve. It is a personal decision for each individual patient to make, and efforts to regulate those decisions and distort the health care market leave patients and families with fewer options and leave health care choices in the wrong hands. .
Christina Smith is Director of Health Science Policy for Citizens Against Government Waste. Citizens Against Government Waste is a non-partisan, non-profit organization representing her more than one million members and supporters nationwide with a mission to end government waste, mismanagement and inefficiency.
