North Carolina again? Are you kidding me?

Last week, they passed HB 434 to gut prior auth abuse, junk billing, and facility fee scams. Now they’re coming for the PBMs. Hard.

Senate Bill 769 doesn’t nibble at the edges. It targets the exact scam pharmacy benefit managers have run for years—price manipulation, shady rebates, and kickbacks that bury the patient and squeeze the pharmacist.

This bill says: disclose your spread pricing. Show us the real acquisition cost. Stop clawing back money from pharmacies after the fact like some legal Ponzi scheme.

If you’ve ever gone to fill a script and been told it’s not covered—even when your doctor says it’s medically necessary—this is why. If you’ve ever watched your pharmacy close, then re-open as a CVS, this is why.

The PBMs write the rules. They control the networks, dictate the prices, and get paid three times on every transaction. And nobody regulates them. Until now.

And no, you weren’t in the room when this happened. Neither were patients. Just the usual industry suits making deals behind closed doors.

Now this was all done in backdoor committee lobby darkness. Just imagine how much more powerful things would be if every patient was a voter and not a secondhand note. Maybe it's time to think about a patients rights PAC. An American first.

https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2025/06/02/nc-lawmakers-target-pharmacy-middlemen-in-proposed-reforms/