Opinion: Cancer patients should be treated by their doctors, not pharmacy benefit managers
If your mom was facing breast cancer or your son had brain cancer, who do you want making treatment decisions: their doctors or a pharmacy benefit manager?
When I must tell a patient that she or he has cancer, that diagnosis comes with the explicit promise that I will provide timely treatment, including medicines aimed at curing cancer or extending life as long as possible.
But an insidious interloper now often comes between me and my patients. I’m talking about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen that have introduced a bureaucratic and nightmarish system of delays and denials into filling prescriptions.
I’m not alone.
