CVS, UnitedHealth ask for FTC's Khan and 2 commissioners to be disqualified from case

By Amina Niasse

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CVS Health and UnitedHealth Group have asked U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya to disqualify themselves from an FTC lawsuit that has accused the companies of unlawfully inflating insulin prices. The companies provided the motions to Reuters after filing them late on Tuesday with the FTC's in-house court. They said that Khan, along with Slaughter and Bedoya, displayed bias against pharmacy benefit managers and prejudged their pricing models.

CVS pointed to the commissioners' claims that volume-based discounts, or rebates, lead to higher prices for patients, and to Khan's appearance at a National Community Pharmacist Association event in 2022. The group, made up of independent pharmacists, has criticized pharmacy benefit managers. "Event participants wore anti-PBM paraphernalia, including pins that vilified PBMs as “bloodsuckers” and shirts depicting PBMs as vampires," the document read.

UnitedHealth said that the commissioners' appearances at anti-pharmacy benefit manager events showed their prejudice. The FTC suit accuses CVS Health's Caremark, UnitedHealth's Optum, and Cigna's Express Scripts of unfairly limiting access to insulin drugs with lower list prices and steering patients toward more expensive drugs to increase the spread of profit generated from negotiated discounts.

Express Scripts also supported the CVS complaint. CVS's response also pointed to statements published by the commissioners in 2022, stating PBMs exclude cheaper generics from plans and 2024 congressional testimony describing PBMs as "middlemen" between drugmakers and patients seeking access to medications. In recent years, both Amazon and Meta's Facebook tried and failed to have Khan removed from their antitrust cases.

(Reporting by Amina Niasse; Editing by Caroline Humer and Muralikumar Anantharaman)