You may remember my post somewhat facetiously titled The End of Managed Care. The concept was that managed care plans had stopped trying to manage physician behavior and had given up in the face of aggressive class action lawsuits from doctors who wanted to get paid more quickly and objected to being "down-coded".

Well the lawyer behind that suit is turning his sights on the PBMs on behalf of some smaller pharmacies. The new suit filed today alleges that the PBMs are forcing patients to use their mail-order services instead of the local pharmacies (which seems likely but probably not illegal to me) and are forcing unfair contracts upon small pharmacies (which if your definition of "unfair" means "using your buying power to extract lower prices" also seems likely but not illegal). Still, worth watching this space and seeing if yet more legal antics for the PBMs actually has any effect on their business. As someone who completely underestimated the impact of the backlash against managed care, I’m loathe to say that this seemingly hopeless suit will have no impact on PBMs.