Commitment to Seniors Launches Campaign Urging Congress to Pass the Senate Finance Committee’s Bipartisan PBM Reforms This Year

Commitment to Seniors, a project of American Commitment, has launched a national and multi-state grassroots mobilization and paid media campaign urging Congress to ACT NOW and pass the Senate Finance Committee’s bipartisan PBM reforms, S. 2973 and S. 3430, to deliver real savings to seniors.

The “Big Three” PBMs, which control nearly 80% of the market, are all tied to vertically integrated health insurance conglomerates – UnitedHealth Group (the nation’s largest health insurer), CVS Health, and Cigna. PBMs function by “negotiating” list prices with drugmakers—on which copays are based—while securing substantial rebates that never reach patients at the pharmacy counter but instead simply bolster corporate PBM profit margins.

One major reason American seniors’ health care costs are skyrocketing is that these big insurer-PBM corporations are pocketing massive drug pricing discounts meant for seniors in Medicare. In fact, big insurer-PBM profits are often linked directly to high drug prices, meaning more profits for middlemen and higher costs for seniors who rely on Medicare.

Big insurer-PBM corporations have benefited from minimal Congressional oversight and were even granted extended exemptions from federal anti-corruption laws under the Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), allowing them to further profit from large drug discounts meant for Medicare patients. Now, many on both sides of the aisle in Congress are working to end these corporate middlemen’s ability to inflate prices paid by patients – especially American seniors in Medicare.