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ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The National Community Pharmacists Association on Thursday has joined a class action lawsuit against discount drug card company GoodRx as well as CVS Caremark Corp.; Express Scripts, Inc.; MedImpact Healthcare Systems, Inc.; and Navitus Health Solutions, LLC, accusing them of colluding in a price-fixing scheme to fix reimbursements to independent pharmacies.
“GoodRx’s business model already potentially misleads consumers by preferentially listing some large chain pharmacies in their search results despite the higher-ranked pharmacies having higher prices, excluding nearly all independent pharmacies from appearing in the results,” said NCPA CEO B. Douglas Hoey. “The actions alleged in this class action suit further disadvantage small businesses and cater to PBMs.”
The class action suit alleges GoodRx is aggregating competitively sensitive data from the named pharmacy benefit managers, including their reimbursement rates for independent pharmacies, and then distributing each discount card transaction to the PBM with the lowest rate. In other words, the PBMs agree not to compete with each other for pharmacy services, and in exchange they are guaranteed never to reimburse independent pharmacies more than the rock-bottom rate.
NCPA will be joining a case in the Central District of California brought by Community Care Rx, an independent pharmacy in Michigan. Community Care Rx alleges that GoodRx and several PBMs, including CVS Caremark and Express Scripts, are violating federal antitrust law by sharing competitively sensitive information and using it to set the lowest possible reimbursement with no apparent benefit to the patient.
“Adding insult to injury, GoodRx charges pharmacies an additional fee for each transaction that it processes for the PBMs,” Hoey said. “Then it splits the fee between the PBM with the lowest pharmacy reimbursement and the PBM handling the drug benefit for the patient. Often, after the lowball price and fees have been forced on the pharmacy, there’s no margin left or, outrageously, the pharmacy may actually be paying GoodRx for the ‘privilege’ of being paid below its cost to acquire the drug. We are suing to stop this!”
