Barron’s: “Does Express Scripts Clean Up Nicely?”

From Barron’s:

Shares of pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts (ESRX) are up about 4% since last week, as the company reiterated its desire to adapt to healthcare industry upheavals.

On CNBC this morning, the PBM’s chief executive Tim Wentworth said he’d be happy to partner with a health insurer or with Amazon.com (AMZN), if that e-commerce giant jumped into the pharmacy business.

(…)

On Monday, Express Scripts announced a move that will get it out from under one of the clouds hanging over its business practices. It agreed to sell its United BioSource business to the New York private equity firm Avista Capital Partners, for an undisclosed sum. Drug makers hire United BioSource to facilitate prescriptions for high-priced drugs — an activity that appeared to conflict with Express Scripts’ cost-containment mission. United BioSource was named in a price-fixing class action suit last month, as well as a whistleblower suit that alleged it helped defraud government health plans (“Two Lawsuits Hit Express Scripts Unit on Pricing,” November 15, 2017). Express Scripts and its co-defendants denied the allegations in both suits. Concerns about United BioSource’s activities were first reported in Barron’s (“Express Scripts Unit’s Connection to High Priced Specialty Drugs,” November 21, 2015).

Posted by on November 30th, 2017 at 12:31 pm


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