30 Days of US Healthcare: Pharmacy Benefit Managers

About this video

This 30 Days of US Healthcare sketch, presented here with Arabic captions, has insurance employee Timothy ask his boss how to lower customers’ drug costs and get sent to the pharmacy benefit manager, only to discover the boss is the PBM too. Flanary portrays one company as simultaneously the insurer, the PBM operating as Optum, and the owner of the pharmacy patients must use. The boss boasts about this vertical integration and its enormous revenue while dismissing the idea of meaningful oversight.

Key takeaways

• Flanary portrays a single corporation as insurer, PBM, and pharmacy owner at once
• His claim is that PBMs negotiate discounts but keep the savings rather than passing them to patients
• The sketch argues the PBM decides which drugs are covered and effectively sets prices
• Vertical integration is presented as the reason drug costs stay high with little accountability

Episode details: published September 22, 2023 · 175.1K views · 2:09 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Everything described is Dr. Glaucomflecken’s (Will Flanary, MD) satire and commentary on the US medical system, attributed to him as satire — his sketches are comedy, not documentation, and this is not medical advice.

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