NCPA doubles down on UnitedHealth, Change deal
By HME News Staff
Updated 11:06 AM CST, Mon February 7, 2022
ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The National Community Pharmacists Association reiterated its call to the Federal Trade Commission to block UnitedHealth Group’s acquisition of Change Healthcare in a recent letter. UHG owns United Healthcare, a major health insurer, and Optum, a pharmacy benefit manager and mail order pharmacy. NCPA CEO B. Douglas Hoey has warned the merger would create a massively unfair advantage in the marketplace for a company that is already dominant and would threaten fair competition, independent pharmacies and patient choice. “The proposed acquisition by UnitedHealth Group’s Optum of Change Healthcare will exponentially increase the ability of vertically integrated UHG-Optum-OptumRx to exploit competitor data to its advantage, including targeting specific patients and steering business to OptumRx,” he said. The NCPA has called on the FTC to work with the Department of Justice to address the anticompetitive practices of PBMs, including transactions like UHG/Optum-Change that impact markets where both agencies have expertise, and to use its 6(b) authority to investigate PBM anticompetitive practices. Change’s eRx “switch” – which is currently a neutral information collection and routing tool – would be “a gold mine of competitor information – the keys to the kingdom,” Hoey says. “The trove of competitively sensitive information that Change collects every day about patients and competitors would not be protected by firewalls, which the FTC and DOJ have both acknowledged are difficult to monitor and enforce,” he said.
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