House panel finds CVS Caremark may have broken antitrust laws
A House committee found that CVS Health may have violated federal antitrust laws by threatening independent pharmacies to keep them from using money-saving services outside the company’s pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) network.
The House Judiciary Committee, led by Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), opened an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices by the company’s PBM, CVS Caremark, in December 2024, seeking to examine the company’s relationship with pharmaceutical hubs, third-party online services designed to streamline patient access to complex specialty medication and increase price transparency.
In the report released Wednesday, the committee said that internal documents showed CVS leveraged its pharmacy network contracts to stifle competition by learning how the hub models operate, then changing its rules to prevent independent pharmacies from working with hubs.
“In 2019, CVS Health developed a plan to invest heavily in the digital pharmacy sector after facing intense competition from the likes of PillPack, Phil, and Blink. CVS Health saw online pharmacy services as the future and feared falling behind in the market if it did not develop its own hub pharmacy to compete against outside hubs like Blink,” the report states.
“After surveilling competing rival hubs and investigating independent pharmacies that work with those hubs, CVS Health began taking aggressive action to eliminate any outside competition,” it continued.
“It is possible that CVS Health’s conduct violated the antitrust laws,” the report concludes.
A spokesperson for CVS said in a statement on Wednesday that the company is reviewing the committee’s findings.
“We are reviewing the report,” said David Whitrap, the company’s vice president of communications. “We are not opposed to hubs or other innovative models to improve the patient experience. In May 2025 we updated our provider manual to make it easier for pharmacies in our network to use them.”
CVS initially justified its actions by claiming it was trying to stop fraud within the hub system, but it provided no evidence to support those allegations, according to the report.
The company then claimed it was working to remove hyperinflated drugs from its formulary to reduce costs for patients and plan sponsors, such as the patient’s employer. Internal documents reportedly showed, however, that the company instead sought to pressure independent pharmacies to stop dispensing “certain unfavored medication” through audits and cease-and-desists.
This behavior, the report says, “makes it more difficult for pharmacies to choose to work with hubs, deprives consumers of the benefits of these innovations, and creates barriers to entry for potential CVS Health competitors.”
The report states that the company reversed course only after the committee launched its investigation.
“CVS Health indicated that it has planned to modify its provider manual to allow independent pharmacies to work with hubs without restriction, but those changes have not yet materialized, and CVS Health is not restricted from reverting to more restrictive provider manual language in the future,” the report continued.
The disruption to hubs not only helped boost CVS’s profits but also hurt consumers, the report concluded.
PBMs serve as intermediaries between insurers, drug manufacturers, and pharmacies and have faced strong criticism for their role in setting prescription drug lists and prices. The “big three” PBMs — CVS Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s OptumRx — control roughly 60 percent of the market.
A Federal Trade Commission report released last week found that those three companies had generated billions of dollars in revenue by dominating the market and hiking the cost of lifesaving medication, such as for heart disease and cancer.
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