The firms also asked for two other commissioners to be disqualified
The FTC last month sued the three largest pharmacy benefit managers — CVS’ Caremark, UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx, and Cigna $CI’s (CI) Express Scripts — and accused them of artificially inflating the list prices of insulin drugs and shifted that cost to vulnerable patients. The agency said that those three PBMs administer almost 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S. and have created a “perverse” drug rebate system.
In separate motions filed with the FTC, the companies argue that Khan, Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, have “prejudged” their opinions in the agency’s case. Each of the commissioners, CVS says in its complaint, have repeated “incorrect prejudgments” about the company’s pharmacy benefit managers (PBM), including that they “control” drug prices.
CVS points to a number of public statements the commissioners have made about PBMs in the past, such as when Bedoya said last year that “some of the stories you hear about pharma are horrific and some of the allegations you hear are horrific, and frankly, keep me up at night.” Slaughter, according to CVS, has called some of PBMs’ practices “disturbing” and “rotten.”
CVS also alleges that Khan has “vilified” PBMs for her entire professional career. The complaint cites Khan’s appearance at a National Community Pharmacist Association event in 2022 where PBMs were called “bloodsuckers” and vampires.
“If the opposite of ‘complete fairness’ is ‘blatant bias,’ the Three Commissioners would easily satisfy even that standard,” CVS wrote in its motion, according to a copy shared with Quartz.
Several other companies, such as Amazon $AMZN and Meta $META, have called for Khan to be disqualified from past antitrust cases, citing her past statements. However, Khan declined to remove herself from the cases. In Meta’s (META) case, that meant defying the advice of the FTC’s top ethics official, who said there is a “reasonable appearance concern with her participation,” Bloomberg News reported last year.
The FTC told Quartz it had no comment on CVS and UnitedHealth Group’s demands.
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