Allan Zimmerman, President and CEO, Navitus Health Solutions

Just as Etopia Media Medical News Network was finishing up a phone interview with Allan Zimmerman, R.Ph., MBA, president and chief executive officer of Navitus™ Health Solutions, based in Madison, Wisconsin, about the BadgerRx Gold program that provides Prescription Benefit Management (PBM) services to residents of Wisconsin, and according to Mr. Zimmerman, might bid on an RFP to do the same for residents of the City of Los Angeles under the terms of an ordinance recently passed there, word came of a proposed $100 million legal settlement between Caremark, one of the three largest PBMs, and the United States Department of Justice, in the person of James Sheehan, the associate U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

You can read more about this case, and about investigations targeting the PBM "Big Three" (Medco, Caremark and ExpressScripts) on the grounds that they are illegally profiting from kickbacks from major drug companies, in a TheStreet.com article by Melissa Davis published today, May 27, 2005, entitled "Drug Kingpins Face Justice."

You can listen to today's Etopia Media Medical News Network exclusive audio interview with Allan Zimmerman, President and CEO of privately-held PBM Navitus Health Solutions, by clicking here

In a May 18, 2005, press release from the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA), "the national association representing Pharmaceutical Benefit Managers (PBMs)," entitled PCMA: New Survey Underscores Need for Policymakers to Embrace PBM Tools," this trade association of PBMs says:

"A new survey out today finds that consumers with drug benefits provided through pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) and private health insurance are far less likely to report having problems affording their prescription drugs as do consumers with drug coverage provided through public programs that generally don't rely on PBMs, underscoring the need for policymakers to embrace PBM tools, the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA) said today. PCMA is the national association representing America's pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). The survey, 'An Update on Americans' Access to Prescription Drugs,' was conducted by researchers at the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC)."

The clear implication of this report and press release are that government drug programs ought to rely more heavily on the services offered by PBMs.

Also apropos of government drug programs is a February 13, 2004, entry entitled "RX Bulk Purchasing," in which Jerry Flanagan, writing on the Weblog site of California Health Consensus—Patients, Doctors, Nurses, Hospitals and Employers Working Together for Universal Health Care Solutions says that "President Bush's drug benefit guarantees a financial windfall for pharmaceutical companies by barring bulk discount negotiations."

You can listen to an audio interview with Jerry Flanagan about how patients could benefit from bulk purchasing of drugs, (and about how entertainment programming consumers and broadband Internet users could benefit through the bulk purchasing of these commodities), by clicking on its title, "Jerry Flanagan, consumer advocate at Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, talks about building consumer power through bulk purchasing."

In his interview, linked to above, Navitus CEO Allan Zimmerman talks about the possible benefits to be derived from aggregating the already-aggregated demand for pharmaceutical products represented by BadgerRx Gold with other, similarly-already-aggregated demand from other PBM programs.

No one is talking yet about aggregating ALL the pharmaceutical-dependent consumers into a single buying club, and creating a prescription drug monopsony, but you have to think that, sooner or later, someone will.

Bringing such an organization into existence, especially if it were transparently and effectively organized, and under the electronically-mediated and direct democratic control of its patient-members, might go a long way towards resolving the existing and impending issues affecting the growing prescription benefit management market.