The FTC Can't Be Serious About Its Attacks on PBMs

An FTC Report Scapegoating Pharmacy Benefit Managers Makes for Poor Fiction

When government agencies abandon evidence for ideology, the result isn’t oversight — it’s propaganda. That’s exactly what we’re seeing in the Federal Trade Commission’s recent interim report on pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which masquerades as consumer protection but is just a political stunt dressed up as economic analysis.

Under the Biden-era leadership of Lina Khan, the FTC has taken a reckless turn — launching smear campaigns against American industries based on emotion, cherry-picked data, and media headlines rather than hard facts.

This latest attack on PBMs is no different. The FTC claims PBMs are the villains behind rising drug costs, yet its own data tells a different story.

Let’s start with the facts: The FTC based its sweeping conclusions on just 51 drugs.

That’s less than 2% of the entire prescription drug market.

And not just any 2% — these were extreme outliers, cherry-picked specialty generics that make up a microscopic share of overall drug spending.

Meanwhile, the agency completely ignored the thousands of brand-name specialty drugs that dominate costs and are exactly where PBMs negotiate massive savings for patients and employers.

Why the omission?

Because a full-picture analysis would have destroyed the FTC’s narrative.

When you look at the entire market, not only do PBMs deliver lower prices, but in many cases, their affiliated pharmacies are reimbursed below the cost of acquiring drugs.

Yes, you read correctly — below cost.

That’s a $15.9 billion savings to the system, dwarfing the $7.3 billion in supposed "markups" from the FTC’s cherry-picked subset.

Even using the FTC’s own flawed markup methodology, a comprehensive analysis shows PBM-affiliated pharmacies are often losing money on many drugs to deliver value to patients.

That’s not exploitation — that’s efficiency.

What’s really going on here is clear: Washington’s progressive elites are waging a proxy war against market forces.

They don’t like that PBMs use scale and competition to negotiate down prices with Big Pharma.

They want government to play middleman, regardless of the cost. And they’re more than willing to sacrifice accuracy, fairness, and integrity to get there.

The agency’s claim that PBMs are destroying independent pharmacies is also a fiction.

The truth is, spending at non-affiliated pharmacies has grown over time.

They still control 58% of the market. So, where’s the collapse? It’s a talking point, not a trend.

Even the FTC’s commissioners have started to distance themselves from this politically driven process. Internal dissent and procedural irregularities have plagued this report from day one.

And the lawsuit the FTC filed against CVS and OptumRx — based on this same flawed data — has already been shelved by the Trump administration pending a thorough review.

That should tell you everything you need to know about how little faith even DOJ has in this sham report.

The irony here is rich.

The FTC accuses PBMs of being unaccountable middlemen, while it acts as an unaccountable political arm of the far-left.

• What happened to due process?
• What happened to real antitrust enforcement grounded in facts, not Twitter trends?

Conservatives should not sit quietly while unelected bureaucrats fabricate crises to justify more federal intrusion.

PBMs aren’t perfect, but they are one of the few forces in the healthcare system who push back against Big Pharma price hikes and negotiate savings for American families.

They should be strengthened, not scapegoated.

This is about more than PBMs — it’s about whether we’re going to let activist regulators rewrite economic reality to fit their political agenda.

If conservatives don’t stand up and push back, we’ll wake up to find every cost-cutting mechanism in our system gutted, and every industry subordinated to the whims of D.C. ideologues.

The FTC’s PBM report isn’t just flawed.

It’s fundamentally unserious.

It deserves to be dismissed, not codified into law.

Let’s base reform on facts — not fiction.

Diana London is a seasoned political strategist and commentator with over five years of experience on Capitol Hill. Currently a Newsmax columnist, Diana is President and Co-Founder of Ford & London Global Strategies, and Vice President of X Capital Investments. She also serves as CEO of The Secret Weapon Agency, specializing in crisis communications and public relations. She works on advancing conservative initiatives and empowering diverse communities as well as championing criminal justice reform. Read Diana London's Reports — More Here.