UnitedHealth Charged Cancer Patients 5000%, Bombshell FTC Report Claims

America's largest health care company, UnitedHealth, made profits of more than 5,000 percent on a lifesaving leukemia drug, according to a Federal Trade Commission report.

The Context

The December murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth's insurance wing, UnitedHealthcare, has ignited a debate about the high cost of medical care in the United States.

Police say the alleged murderer, Luigi Mangione, was found in possession of a manifesto against UnitedHealthcare. He has pleaded not guilty to both federal and state murder charges.

What To Know

A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report found that the three largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) have taken in large profits on lifesaving medicine for heart disease, cancer and HIV.

Pharmacy Benefit Managers are third-party companies connected to pharmacies that are intermediaries between insurance providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers and claim to reduce consumer costs.

The FTC report found that from 2017 to 2022, three PBMs—UnitedHealth Group's Optum, CVS Health's CVS Caremark and Cigna's Express Scripts—marked up prices at their pharmacies by hundreds or thousands of percent.

By doing so, they collectively added $7.3 billion in revenue, the report states.
Figures released with the report show that in 2022, the final year of the study, two cancer drugs had the highest markup.

Newsweek reached out to UnitedHealth, Cigna and CVS Health via email for comment.

Gleevec, the generic form of the leukemia drug Imatinib, was collectively marked up by the three providers by 5232 percent in 2022. For patients using Medicare, the markup was 4154 percent.

For Zytiga, the generic form of the Abiraterone prostate cancer drug, that markup was 2299 percent commercially and 1533 percent for those on Medicare.

UnitedHealth recorded revenue of $372 billion in 2023, making it about the same size as Apple.

The company released its fourth-quarter results on January 16, which beat analysts' profit expectations based on quarterly revenue of $100.8 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year.

What People Are Saying

The FTC, in a statement: "The Big 3 PBMs marked up two specialty generic cancer drugs by thousands of percent and then paid their affiliated pharmacies hundreds of millions of dollars of dispensing revenue in excess of estimated acquisition costs for each drug annually."

A spokesperson for Cigna's Express Scripts told Reuters that the report's findings were misleading and that the calculations are based on a subset of medications that represent less than 2 percent of what the company spends on medications in a year.

CVS Vice President David Whitrap, in a statement: "How many more interim reports will it take before the FTC includes the mountain of data that refutes these few outliers? We've provided terabytes of data in compliance with their requests, and virtually none of that data is reflected in this report."

Pharmaceutical Care Management Association Vice President of Public Affairs Greg Lopes, in a statement: "It's clear this report again fails to consider the entirety of the prescription drug supply chain and makes sweeping assertions about the role of PBMs disconnected from a full appreciation of their critical cost-saving role for employers, unions, taxpayers, and patients."

What Happens Next

The FTC is considering its position and may take legal action.

FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement that the FTC should act swiftly to stop illegal conduct. However, the report states that the issues highlighted do not indicate that any illegal conduct has occurred.