She's wrong. Look at generics. The USA is the cheapest of all western countries.
Any brand drugs with competition would be far cheaper, with or without insurance , if the manufacturers were not terrified that the big PBMs would reduce their formulary availability as punishment for offering a price that is even close to the net net revenue the mfg receives.
Divorce formularies from PBMs and pharma revenue will go up, but prices to patients , cash or insured, will go down. Particularly if you audit all those middlemen
PBMs use formularies to not only get rebates, but also to charge fee after fee. And most of those fees are a percent of the list price.
Big PBMs cost patients a fortune.
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If pharma companies just cut out all those annoying middlemen and sold medicines directly to consumers, wouldn't that cut the prices that people pa...